


Dig the Devil's Blood

by Carrieosity



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, Appalachia, Bath Houses, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Blackmail, Castiel really loves Walt Whitman, Child Labor, Coal Miner Dean Winchester, Coal Mining, Dean Whump, Dean/Cas Pinefest, Explicit Sexual Content, Gay Castiel (Supernatural), Historical References, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mutual Pining, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Poetry, Secret Relationship, Teacher Castiel, West Virginia, deancaspinefest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-03-24 01:53:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 54,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrieosity/pseuds/Carrieosity
Summary: In the early 20th century, coal mines were full of dangers: poisonous gases, potential collapses, explosive materials. Then there were the more subtle threats: crooked dealings, systemic exploitation, lies that protected those with power. Survival meant watching one’s back; a stupid mistake could cost lives.All that coal miner Dean and schoolteacher Castiel can hope is that hiding their blossoming relationship won’t end up costing them everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Last summer, on a family trip back to West Virginia, we had the opportunity to visit an exhibition coal mine--a miniature coal town, with a handful of representative buildings still standing, around the former Phillips-Sprague bituminous drift mine in Beckley, WV. I was captivated by the peek at the lives and work of Appalachian coal miners at the start of the 20th century, particularly because of the number of coal miners in my own family's history. Seeing the tiny houses where the men and their families lived, the company store where they spent their scrip, the much larger home of the superintendent, the dark and damp passages where they labored...it inspired this story, which became a true labor of love.
> 
> You will not need to have a background in Appalachian coal mining to understand it, I promise. Almost everything unfamiliar should be clear from context, and I'll put clarifications of terms that might be obscure in the end notes. At the very end of the story, there's an extra "chapter" with more background information, some of my own photographs, and other interesting tidbits.
> 
> This is the second year I've participated in the DeanCasPinefest, and I've loved it! I especially love the art that my artist [Correlia-be](http://correlia-be.tumblr.com/) created to accompany it, and I know you will, too. Special thanks to my incredible beta reader, [captainhaterade](https://captainhaterade.tumblr.com/), for the hours of help poured into this alongside me!

There wasn’t even a hint of a glow over the horizon as Dean Winchester trudged down the incline into the deeper darkness of the drift mine. A few yards along the path, he found it easier to see past the edges of the small glow provided by his carbide lamp, as the light flickered over the rough rock walls and ceiling around him, reflecting and bouncing back to him from the many nooks and corners. His feet crunched over the crushed rock, occasionally splashing through the odd puddle of water dripping from the ceiling, but there was no other sound to be heard. Once the full crew arrived to begin the day’s work, there would be chatter, laughter, and even whistled or full-throated song echoing through the tunnels, but Dean didn’t break the silence any more than necessary. Even a quiet humming, which he had once tried in an attempt to keep himself entertained, felt eerie when it rebounded back to him, multiplying as it resonated.

[ ](http://de.tinypic.com/?ref=2dr9935)

Miners were superstitious as a rule, and there were already enough ghosts down here. He didn’t need to encourage his imagination to invent more.

When he reached the first chamber, he ran his hands along the ceiling until he found a small hook. Hanging his safety lamp from it, he noted that the flame licked at the middle of the glass, indicating no problems with the air around him. Next, he put it on the floor, where the flame remained perfectly moderate. _Excellent,_ he thought, making a check on his board. The fire was a cheerful yellow, a color he had come to associate with only good things. Dean knocked his fist against the support props and roof bolts, making sure everything sounded stable, before picking up his lamp and moving on to the next chamber.

It could have been lonely work, and sometimes Dean found it so, but there was satisfaction to it, as well. Anything could happen in a mine overnight, and back when he’d swung a pick himself, he had never really felt good trusting the bosses to tell him whether or not the things he couldn’t even see would kill him on any given day. It was no secret to anybody with eyes or ears and an ounce of sense that the mine owners and managers were far more concerned with how much coal they could drag out of the ground every day than whether all the men came out safely along with it. Men were easily replaced, after all. The mine was just as deadly now as it was then, but now that he was the fire boss, at least he could look around with his own eyes each day and know that these checks were being done carefully and thoroughly.

Midway down the easternmost passage, the flame guttered slightly when Dean hung it from the roof. Grimacing, he made a note: _“Methane present, Elkhorn east."_   That would have to be addressed before the men came down to this area, which would slow production for a bit. It couldn’t be helped, but the foreman wouldn’t be happy. Alastair seemed to think that the encouragement he’d given Dean all those years ago, along with the assistance he’d provided Dean to get the necessary emergency rescue training required for the job, put Dean forever in his debt. Well, that and the other favor, which had been worth so much more in Dean’s mind. Whenever Alastair felt like he really needed to yank the leash, that was the one thing he knew he could toss back at Dean, his tone always so careless and light, and be guaranteed to find his mark.

“Your brother, he’s doing well?” Alastair would drawl, false courtesy barely masking the edge in his voice. “Such a lucky break, that assistant engineer job coming open. I know how grateful his family must be.” Dean never missed the way the corners of those lips would twist around the word “grateful.” Dean had been, of course; he’d never wanted Sam to work in the mines at all, even though he himself had been laboring there before his voice had even cracked for the first time. Food was expensive, after all, and Dad’s swiftly diminishing eyesight meant that he could no longer do the mine work that supported his family. John Winchester, proud and stubborn to a fault, balked at doing the menial jobs the foreman offered to him, and started spending his time tending to his whiskey stills. Dean had set his own jaw and did what had to be done, but he had been appalled at the idea of Sam doing the same.

In hindsight, Dean realized Alastair had had his own reasons for intervening. Dean had already caught the eye of the foreman, with his willingness to take on riskier tasks for extra money. On Alastair’s recommendation, Dean had been promoted from pick miner to shot firer, and it had been easy to believe the praise and think that his work had been valuable enough to earn the favor from the pit boss. A few more sympathetic words, a nod of understanding, and suddenly Sam was out of the darkness, laboring above ground on the engines and other machines that ran the cars and belts involved in the mine’s production. The sigh of relief Dean had breathed…well, he was still breathing it, even now that the cost he’d paid for the favor was apparent.

Well, he’d have his argument with Alastair today over the unsafe gas, and he’d keep having them whenever he thought it was necessary, even if he had to back down on occasion. Dealing with that fight was still better than the alternative of potentially letting men die in the name of profits, and sometimes swallowing his pride was better than the alternative of possibly winning the battle but losing the war, having Alastair decide he was no longer worth the effort and replacing him with someone more tractable and with fewer principles.

The sun, still barely visible but comparatively blinding, was always a shock to Dean’s eyes when he came up out of the mine after inspection. When he’d gone in, in the shadows before dawn, there had only been a few other men stirring around the work site, but now there were crowds of workers arriving, chatting amiably with each other. Dean’s own crew of bratticemen were impatiently waiting for him to pass over his slate and give them instructions. Benny and Garth were clowning around, laughing over a teasing remark, while Victor sat leaning his back against a nearby coal car, drinking coffee from his flask.

“Well, what’s the word, Boss?” Victor called when he saw him approaching. The other two men quickly sobered up, listening attentively. Despite the fact that they were all of an age with Dean, and that they had all worked together as breaker boys and again as pick miners, there was no getting around the tendency to treat any man with “boss” in his title with guarded respect. It made Dean sigh.

“Mostly good, but there are a few chambers on the south that could stand extra pinning, and Elkhorn east might need a couple bleeders eventually. Brattice it for now, see if it’s enough.” He passed over the slate with his notes, letting them look. Drilling bleeder holes in the roof of the methane-contaminated chamber would take much more time than simply redirecting airflow with fire-resistant canvas, but it was a more effective long-term solution. Dean knew which option the foreman would prefer, of course.

His crew grabbed their tools and trotted into the darkness, and Dean rubbed at his eyes. He still had a long day ahead of him, but the hardest work was already finished. Blinking, he saw Alastair watching from a distance, eyes narrowed. Dean shrugged at him, then flashed ten fingers twice, letting him know the shift should be ready to start in less than half an hour. Roof pinning could happen while production was in progress; good, breathable air took precedence. Alastair scowled, but he turned back to his conversation with the supervisor and other bosses.

“Pissing off the management again?” said a deep, rich voice from behind him. Dean shook his head and turned to face Sam. “I still don’t know why they let you join their club,” his brother joked, grinning as he pushed his hair out of his eyes and back into a cap.

“Don’t be jealous just because I get to enjoy their stimulating company every day,” Dean replied dryly. His chest felt a little less tight just seeing Sam and hearing his relaxed laughter.

“Believe me, no jealousy here,” Sam said. “But if you want to be a little envious…” He held out his lunch pail, letting Dean peek in the top. Dean groaned; Sam’s wife, Sarah, had apparently been in a generous mood. He tried to snake his hand into the pail to snag the fresh pepperoni roll, but Sam anticipated the move, snapping the lid shut and hopping back a step with a triumphant shout. The two of them circled each other playfully for a few moments, jabbing and dodging, before Sam finally waved a hand, then reopened the pail. “Not that you deserve it, but here,” he said, and pulled out the extra roll Sarah had included for Dean.

“You better marry that girl,” Dean joked, inhaling the scent with pleasure.

Sam snorted. “Yeah, our three kids probably agree with you. And by the way, that baking of Sarah’s is courtesy of her extreme relief that two of the three will be out of her hair every day for a while. Mine company finally hired a new teacher for the school. Jack and Jesse looked like condemned men at breakfast this morning.”

Dean chuckled, picturing it. He’d only attended the coal town’s small school for a few years, though he hadn’t had any particular feelings one way or the other about going. Sam had enjoyed his years there, though he hadn’t finished, either. Even if there hadn’t been a need to work, getting a teacher to stick around more than a couple of years was difficult, considering the low pay and the derisive attitude held by the coal town management toward the education of laborers’ children.

The sun continued to rise, and the rest of the day held no surprises. The pepperoni roll turned out to be the highlight of Dean’s day, unexpected enjoyment that it was. He felt a little twinge of remorse sitting in the grass outside to eat it; most of the workers, including his crew, were eating their own lunches underground. Sunlight was a luxury afforded to few on the payroll, and though he tried to feel appreciative, most of the time Dean just felt guilty and somewhat undeserving.

The morning’s repair work seemed to have done the trick, at least for the moment, and the afternoon passed with as few issues as the morning had. Dean accompanied his crew into the tunnels, checking in with the workers about anything they’d noticed throughout the day. He knew that most of the supervisors preferred to wait in the whitewashed underground office—or, better still, in the above-ground operations building—but he was also aware of the reluctance many laborers felt about approaching supervisors with their concerns. He’d be damned if he’d let an accident happen on his watch just because now he was suddenly supposed to be “too good” to stomp through the darkness.

When his shift ended, earlier than Sam’s since he’d started before anyone else, he took his time washing up in the company bathhouse. This was one privilege he definitely did not have trouble appreciating; showering first meant that he didn’t have to worry about not having a dry towel to use when he was done. Of course, there was no erasing the black dust near-permanently embedded in the whorls of his fingertips and around his nails, but he did take his time letting the hot water run into and around his ears, rinsing the grime from the odd locations it had no business getting into in the first place.

“How many layers did you have to shuck off today?” Sam asked as he passed Dean on the way in for his own quick shower. Quickly coiling his wet towel, Dean snapped it across the back of Sam’s thighs and snickered at the resulting yelp. Escaping outside to wait for Sam, he saw a small figure running and tripping toward him, and he waved when he recognized the boy. Jesse didn’t yet have anything like Sam’s height, even compared to when Sam had been that young, but his legs pumped with the same loose ease of his father. He was growing his hair long like Sam, too, though it curled in dark waves around his shoulders like his mother’s.

“Hi, Uncle Dean,” Jesse panted when he reached him. “Mama sent me to see if you wanted to come to our place for dinner tonight. She’s got a stew on, and it smells real good!”

Dean’s stomach growled at the thought. Sarah was an excellent cook, and it was far more pleasant to eat dinner with his noisy family than to sit by himself in his own tiny bachelor cabin. Most days, the invitation was perfunctory; Dean knew he was always welcome at his brother’s house, especially since it meant an extra set of hands occupying the children and making sure mischief was kept to a minimum. The family dinners were markedly different from the cautious, emotionally volatile meals he’d had when he was a child, and he felt as though they were slowly healing parts of his heart he’d never known were damaged.

On the other hand, they also reminded him of what he didn’t have, which was a different kind of ache in itself. “Mmm, sounds good,” Dean said, stooping to ruffle Jesse’s curls and swipe a bit of dirt from the bridge of his nose with his thumb. “I’d better not, though. Got some pork left over from last night, and if I don’t eat it, it’ll start growing fur.” He made a grotesque face, and the boy giggled. “You tell your mama I said thanks, though, and thank her for the pepperoni roll, too.”

“I helped roll the dough,” Jesse said solemnly, and Dean widened his eyes in exaggerated surprise.

“Well, it was fine work,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be a cook someday, working in a fine restaurant down out of the hills somewhere. Better learn your letters first, so you can write to us when you go, tell us all about your adventures. I heard you got to go to school today, right?”

Jesse made a face at that. “Yeah, we did. Boring. And Mr. Novak talks funny.”

“What, is he a foreigner? Or does he just have a silly voice?” Dean raised his voice to squeak his words, pulling another giggle from his nephew.

“Uncle Dean!” Jesse groaned, rolling his eyes. _Already trying to act the grown-up, and he’s not even twelve._ Dean sighed to himself, wishing he could stop time for a while. “He just talks fast, and he uses big words. He made Jack’s grade read _poems._ ” The scowl on his face and disgust in his voice conveyed his opinion on that matter.

“Hey, poems aren’t so bad,” Dean protested, speaking slightly more loudly as he heard footsteps approaching from behind him. “Wanna hear a good one? Let’s see: ‘There once was a man from Nantucket…’”

“Dean!” Sam growled, cuffing him on the back of the head. Dean fell to his side on the ground, laughing. “Stop corrupting my kids! Bad enough that you taught them all the ‘extra’ verses to the church hymns. Sarah nearly had a heart attack before I could drag them out of the church pew and make them stop.”

“Hey, ‘Rock of Ages’ needed something extra,” Dean gasped between chortles. “And it was Pastor Jim’s grandson who taught those verses to me when I was a kid, so I don’t think it was anything new to him.”

“Whatever, Dean. I’m telling Sarah to give you the burnt rolls from now on.” Sam held out a hand, hauling Dean back to his feet. “So you coming over tonight? I think I’ve got a couple of loose shingles, could use your help to get ‘em all tacked back down.”

Dean winced a little, feeling torn between compulsion to help and urge to hide out by himself and manage his envy in private. “Maybe not tonight, but tomorrow? I’m a little beat this time.”

“Take it easy, then,” Sam shrugged. “If you need anything, I can always swing by your place later.”

“Nah. Got some leftovers, even enough for tomorrow’s lunch, and I probably won’t even worry with the coal stove tonight, as warm as it’s been. Likely I’ll be asleep before you even get the kids washed up.”

Sam nodded in understanding, clapping him on the upper arm before he abruptly hauled Jesse up and across his own shoulders. The boy shrieked, all pretense at being too big for childish silliness evaporating as he scrambled for a handhold in the fabric of Sam’s shirt, feet kicking wildly. Sam strode off placidly toward home, paying no notice to the flailing limbs.

The sun was still well above the horizon, but it seemed to Dean as though the warmth and light of the day dimmed with his brother’s departure. _You wanted this for him,_ he reminded himself. Dean’s entire life, he’d made Sam’s happiness a priority, even above his own. Now that Sam had the devoted wife and children he’d always wanted, and the relatively safe job that Dean had paid for with his own pride and integrity, Dean should feel satisfied, not jealous. _Was it too much to want that for both of us?_ a small voice in his head whispered, and he firmly crushed the thought, because the answer was “yes,” and he’d always known that.

Rewarmed dinner for one didn’t take long to prepare or to eat, leaving Dean with too much time to kill, which was a danger when his mind felt at loose ends. His single-room cabin was narrow enough that he could stretch out his arms and nearly touch both walls with his fingertips. It wasn’t really built for much beyond the basics of living, but he did have a small shelf with a handful of books sitting beside his bed. Dean ran his hands over the spines; despite the teasing he’d given Jesse, he actually enjoyed reading, and these were old favorites. Bypassing the usual Zane Grey adventure stories he loved, his hand instead fell on a thin, well-worn volume that would have stunned his nephew to find here. Dean smiled wistfully, lying back on his mattress, and carefully opened the cover, dry and cracked with age.

_Let us go then, you and I,_  
_When the evening is spread out against the sky_  
_Like a patient etherized upon a table…_

Dean knew more poetry than dirty limericks, oh yes. Letting the lush imagery roll over his mind, Dean found himself in Eliot’s words of loneliness and regret. He shaped the words silently with his mouth, feeling their weight, hearing their sharp beauty. When the light from his window finally faded too much to allow reading, it no longer mattered; the book lay across Dean’s chest, which rose and fell with his breath as he dreamed.

\---

A few housing rows away and about a quarter mile upslope along the side of the hill rising to the north of the mine, Castiel Novak was second-guessing the hell out of every decision he’d made that had led him to this point in his life.

He didn’t regret becoming a teacher, not really. It hadn’t been his dream job, certainly, but he had known better than to think he could simply declare himself a writer and find that bold declaration somehow enough to fund shelter and food. In his early twenties, he had admired the audacity of the genius writers who had lived the lives of vagabonds—Whitman, Muir—but now, on the far side of thirty, Castiel wondered what aspect of that genius granted those possessed of it an immunity to illness or hunger. So, then, his fall-back plan: become an educator, shape young minds, and then pour the frustrations from the experience into the stories he’d someday pen.

Looking around at his new home, Castiel decided that if frustrations could fuel inspiration, he’d be a legend someday. He was exhausted; the excitement and adrenaline from his first day in his own classroom had given way to the daunting realization that he was going to have to do all of it again and again, day after day. He had no energy left to even consider tackling the trunks and boxes he had yet to unpack, not that his new house had room for most of the contents. Then again, before he fully settled in, there were a number of problems with the house itself that he would have to address. The gaping hole in the middle of the floor in the main room certainly called for attention, as did the leak in the ceiling almost directly over the spot he assumed once held the bed. Scrapes along the floorboards showed how the bed had been shoved to the side, and a bucket, nearly full from an earlier rainstorm, had been placed helpfully under the crack in the ceiling.

And there were mice. Castiel sorely regretted not having managed to bring his old tomcat, who would have been thrilled by the challenge. Alas, Pangur had stayed behind when Castiel left home to attend normal school and train as a teacher, and the cat was now far too old and set in his ways to come along for this journey. _Maybe one of the neighbors has a cat I can borrow,_ he mused.

He shouldn’t complain. He _couldn’t_ complain, not with the hope of anything coming from it. The fact that he even had a house about which to complain was thanks only to the generosity of his brother. Gabriel had loaned him the first two months’ worth of rent and waved away all of Castiel’s fervent promises to pay back the money as soon as he could. His own paltry savings had been decimated by the move and his initial living expenses; he’d have to budget carefully over the next several months if he wanted to start rebuilding any kind of safety net and be able to repay Gabriel’s generosity.

Well, there was no way he was going to find the fortitude to go climbing on the roof tonight. The bucket had apparently been serving well so far; it could continue to do its job for now. Neither did he have any supplies on hand to repair the floor. Instead, Castiel put his shoulder to the edge of the heavy kitchen table and shoved it across the floor until it covered the gap. There, now he wouldn’t accidentally put his foot directly through it in a sleepy morning daze. Finally, he rummaged through the random items that had been left behind in the tiny closet, under the bed, and on the backs of the shelves by the previous tenants, finally turning up three serviceable (if grotesquely filthy) old snap mousetraps. He swallowed hard at the sight of the third, which was still “occupied,” but he managed to get all three relatively cleaned and baited with bits of waxy cheese bought from the company store.

“This house is under new management,” he muttered, placing the traps in the darker corners of the house. “It really would be best for everyone if you chose to leave peacefully, but I must insist that you do, indeed, leave.” _Arguing with rodents,_ Castiel thought wryly. _That’s putting the finely-honed rhetoric skills to good use._ There were still mice, likely to be scampering around the house all night while he slept, but at least he could console himself that he’d done what he could for now, along with pulling a blanket over his face.

“This is my home now,” he spoke out loud again to the empty room. After a youth crowded with siblings and society, followed by the communal living of academia, this new setting felt incredibly lonely, yet somehow exciting in its novelty. He could eat what he wished, provided he could afford it, and there would be nobody to complain if he filled the kitchen with the most pungent cooking aromas he could imagine. He could sing loudly and off-key, and no one would hear him to demand that he stop. It was liberating, and yet with all of the freedom now available, Castiel could not for the life of himself come up with one scandalous thing to try for which he had the energy.

Instead, he lit an oil lamp and seated himself at the table with notebook and pen. “Just because it’s my first day,” he assured himself; oil was expensive, so in the future, he’d need to primarily stick to candles for evening use, no matter the eye strain. With a flourish, he neatly wrote the date at the top of the page: _**April 14, 1929**. _ Then he paused, mind racing, considering the words he could use to capture the start of his new life. He waited for the thoughts to come, ones that might help him sort out all of his mixed-up, conflicted feelings.

When the first trap snapped sharply, an hour later, he was still staring at an empty page.

Finally, he began.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Carbide lamps - More than just light under the ground. The flames would react in different ways based upon the air around them and any gases present. Fire bosses like Dean would carefully note the color and height of the flame at the top and bottom of each chamber (some gases are heavy and sink, while some are light and stay near the top). No canaries at this point in time, folks.
> 
> Bratticemen - Dean's crew. They fixed air problems by redirecting flow with fans, canvas "walls," and other methods.
> 
> There were all kinds of "bosses" related to mine work, but the main ones to know here are fire boss (Dean), foreman (Alastair is one), superintendent, and mine company owner. The owner would essentially build the town around the mine - houses, store, church, school - and were almost like feudal lords, in effect. The towns weren't incorporated; they had no real oversight. The "luxuries" provided by the owners were intended to keep the work force pacified and profitable.
> 
> Normal school - teacher training school, before education degrees were a thing.
> 
> Pepperoni rolls: God's Food.  
> [](https://www.flickr.com/gp/carrier/tf6hLC)


	2. Chapter 2

“…one country, one language, and one flag.” The classroom of boys and girls fidgeted as they stood with hands outstretched toward the flag hanging in the corner. Most of the younger pupils were still unfamiliar with the words, especially the immigrant children, but they did their best to mumble along, showing much more cooperation than the row of older boys in the back, subtly elbowing each other and communicating messages of mischief with their eyes.

“Good, good,” Castiel murmured, ignoring the boys for the moment. “Now, the Commandments.” He directed his pointer at the ornate copy of the Ten Commandments hanging by the blackboard. “I am the Lord thy God…”

The students joined in, reciting their way through the “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” repetitions with all the life of a three-day-gone corpse. The row of overgrown imps in the back row grew even bolder, daring to whisper. They had no desire to be here, Castiel knew; the only reason they even set foot in the classroom was because they were too young to find employment without the permission and assistance of their parents, and many of their mothers were unwilling to facilitate that big jump away from the trappings of youth. Besides, there was still a chance, however low, that at least one or two of the muttering and smirking boys sitting back there would grow up to find success in a field with less risk than coal mining.

“Good,” he said again when the mumbling faded away once more. “And the scripture, which upper grades will find on page 167 of your readers. Lower grades, attend.” After the sound of page flipping stopped, Castiel pointed at the blackboard, where he’d copied the words in large, clear letters, and gestured for the students to begin recitation.

“ _Bless the Lord, O my soul…_ ”

Castiel found it a painfully ironic situation, his being charged so heavily with imparting spiritual as well as academic guidance. He had long since abandoned his own belief in the teachings of the church, or at least in the harsh messages shouted at him from the pulpit of his father’s Presbyterian pulpit. Normal school had been a revelation; he’d still attended church—a much quieter Disciples of Christ congregation—but only under firm suggestion from the dean, and he’d found himself surrounded by like-minded men who were not subtle about how they were merely going through the motions for the sake of propriety, not their souls.

And now he found himself impatiently waiting for another generation of children to drone their way through a Psalm, stumbling over “coverest” and “stretchest” and other archaic word forms. He desperately tried not to see himself in the awkward-looking boy in the second row, frowning in skepticism over a chariot constructed of clouds. When even state law mandated this farce, the only option was to grin and bear it. That, and perhaps make sure that at least a few poetry and prose lessons hinted at some alternatives. Thomas Hardy would be a bit too obvious, but perhaps Percy Shelley would escape comment.

After the daily morning rituals were completed, Castiel split the classroom into the various grades so that the students could begin work in their various primers and readers. He set the youngest students to scrawling their letters on slates, kept the middle grades in the McGuffey Readers, and instructed the oldest students to open their Mitchells. “Begin reading aloud at the top of page six, Mr. Daniels. ‘Of the Land.’” Mr. Daniels, a freckled blond boy, blushed when the boy behind him stifled a laugh, but he did as he was told.

If the students found the day dull, Castiel couldn’t really blame them. There was nothing particularly entertaining about learning the names of the three continents and the countries in each, but it had to be done. Unfortunately, the drudgery only encouraged the urge to misbehave, and he found himself needing to try out his pristine paddle for the first time before they’d even reached lunchtime. The resounding crack of leather against bottom was startling for both student and teacher, and Castiel was relieved that it didn’t need to be repeated for the rest of the day.

Finally, the clock completed its agonizing trek toward the end of the day. When the students fled the classroom with a burst of sudden energy that had been invisible only moments prior, Castiel sagged into his chair with a groan. Two days down, and he was already so tired! He scrubbed at his eyes for a moment, then opened them to see a slight young man standing politely in front of his desk. “Mr. Winchester, was it?” he said, trying to recover some of his authoritative tone.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “It’s Jack. I only wanted to ask…did you need some help with the erasers and blackboard? The last teacher always made one of us stay after to help, but I didn’t know if you knew.”

“Oh,” Castiel said. He actually hadn’t thought about that, though he felt stupid now that he did. Of course, that was how things worked. He’d been so caught up in his own anticipation of day’s end that he’d not considered that he might extend it for an unlucky pupil or two. “Yes, I would certainly appreciate the assistance. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Novak, sir,” Jack said, a smile dancing across his lips as he crossed to the blackboard and began gathering the chalky erasers.

“Will your mother not miss you?” Castiel wondered, watching him work. “I’d hate to have her think you were held back for poor behavior. Your work today was of good quality.”

“Jesse will tell her. That’s my little brother,” Jack replied, and Castiel remembered a second boy named Winchester. Whereas Jack had been respectful and engaged throughout his lessons, the younger boy had been…lively. That was a delicate way of describing it. “Anyway, Mama would be more upset with me for not helping than she would if I was a little late for chores. She says helping keeps us humble, and if we don’t go that route, the switch will do the trick.” Castiel couldn’t restrain his bark of laughter, and Jack grinned more openly this time. “And even that would be better than if Dad caught wind. His whoopings are the worst!”

“Well, we wouldn’t want any of that,” Castiel agreed, returning the grin. Together, they cleaned the board and swept the floor, picking up little balls of paper that Castiel hadn’t even noticed the older children flicking. Jack, so quiet during school, readily opened up and chatted about his family and life around town when Castiel asked curious questions. He returned the favor when Jack peppered him with his own questions about college and travels to far-off places. Castiel was far from worldly, but apparently having grown up in Pennsylvania, even if only just over the border from Wheeling, earned him awe in Jack’s eyes.

The envy ran both ways, as Castiel compared the obvious adoration Jack had for his parents and younger siblings with the chillier relationships within his own family. “Mama’s pies are the _best,_ ” Jack proclaimed as Castiel finally closed the schoolroom door behind them and they descended the steps together. “Even Uncle Dean says they’re good, and he’s pickier than anybody. But Mama got the church ladies’ prize this summer, and she says it’s wrong to brag, but it’s not bragging if it’s talking about somebody else, is it?”

“No, I’m sure—” Castiel interrupted himself when he saw a woman approaching, child slung on her hip. Jack caught the direction of his glance, and he turned to see for himself.

“Mama!” he called, waving. Castiel stood up a little taller, smoothing his waistcoat. Jack’s descriptions had made his mother sound practically next to sainthood, and he was eager to meet her for himself.

“I see my boy has been keeping you occupied,” Mrs. Winchester said, raising an eyebrow at her son, who ducked his head. “I hope he’s been minding his manners, Mr. Novak?” She was a delicate-looking woman, though rather tall, and her large hazel eyes sparked with intelligence. The little girl in her arms buried her face in her mother’s neck, but one eye peeked out at him with interest.

“He’s been nothing but pleasant,” Castiel assured her as sincerely as he could. “I appreciate the help he gave me this afternoon. I must confess, I didn’t anticipate teaching being so exhausting. Last night, I nearly fell asleep at my supper table.”

“Hmmm,” she said, eyes narrowed but not unfriendly. “I assume you’ve no children of your own, then?”

“No, nor wife,” he replied. He had wondered whether he would face any gossip or criticism for his bachelorhood, and he hoped it wouldn’t start so soon. It wasn’t as though any wife would be in his future, either, though he wasn’t about to say so.

Mrs. Winchester made another thoughtful noise, then nodded to herself. “Well, we don’t want our new teacher expiring from exhaustion when you’ve only just got here,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of your pupils’ mothers eager to get their hands on you, but since I got here first, you’ll have to come to supper at our home tonight.” Jack spun to face him excitedly at the invitation, hands flying up into fists in delight.

“Oh, Mrs. Winchester, you don’t need to do that,” Castiel protested weakly, not wanting to disappoint Jack but still nervous about the suddenness of the invitation. Was he to be matched with a maiden aunt or sister? He’d heard of such things happening.

“Of course I do,” she insisted firmly, laying a surprisingly strong hand on his forearm and smiling. It was so like her son’s, lighting up her whole face, that it caught Castiel off-guard and pulled a smile out of him in return. “Anyway, my husband’s brother joins us often enough, so we’ve already got a crowd most days. One more won’t harm anything. Besides,” she added as he began to follow her along the path, “it’s what good Christian folk do.”

_If you only knew,_ Castiel thought with a grimace.

The walk to the Winchester house wasn’t long. The house in which Jack and his family lived was part of a row of many closely-spaced two-story structures, a short fence running along in front providing the only separation between a tiny open space too small to be called a yard and the dirt road. Between the houses, Castiel caught glimpses of larger backyards; the placid clucking of hens drifted from behind several houses. These were nicer houses, more well-maintained and larger, than many of those he’d noted when walking to and from the school and the company store, and he wondered what sort of job Mr. Winchester held. It was rare that managers’ children were educated alongside those of the laborers, he knew; most of those fortunate children were sent to boarding or private schools instead.

Jack tried to restrain himself, matching pace with his mother and teacher, but the closer they got to home, the more obvious it was that he wanted to run ahead. Finally, Mrs. Winchester said gently, “Jack, why don’t you run along and let your Dad know we’re coming? He should be home by now, probably wondering. Then go draw some water.” Jack murmured a quick “Yes’m,” then dashed off along the road at a sprint.

“He’s a good boy,” Castiel complimented, watching the dust rise in the wake of Jack’s footfalls. “You and Mr. Winchester should be proud.”

“Oh, please. If you’re going to be sitting at our supper table, you can’t keep calling us ‘Mister’ and ‘Missus.’ My name is Sarah, and my husband, who you’ll meet soon, is Samuel. Sam, to most.” She chucked the toddler under the chin fondly. “You know Jack and Jesse already, of course, and little Sissy, here, is actually Mary. Can you say hello, Sissy?” Mary stubbornly refused to open her mouth, but she did open and close one chubby hand in an approximation of a wave. Sarah clicked her tongue in frustration.

“Glad to meet you, young lady,” Castiel solemnly replied as if the child had spoken.She granted him a shy smile, and warmth surged in his chest. “My name is Castiel.” Sarah’s eyes flickered a bit at the unusual name, but she was apparently too polite to remark.

When they neared their destination, the sound of raised male voices was audible behind the house. Sarah led Castiel through the gate and along the side of the house, where he was surprised by the sight of one of the tallest men he’d ever seen. The man was standing in the yard and gazing up at the roof, hands on hips and head tilted to the side. “Up by the chimney, north side,” he called out. “At least one’s curling for sure.”

“Rest actually looks okay,” a second voice called from somewhere behind the chimney. Castiel squinted up at the silhouette that stepped out from the shadows above them. He couldn’t discern many details, lit from behind as the man was, but his shape appeared well-muscled in the manner of those whose work was physical. “Toss me up a hammer, and I’ll take care of it now.”

“Do _not_ throw hammers,” Sarah interjected hastily. “You both know better.” The tall man startled at the sound of her voice, but he turned and smiled easily, shrugging.

“You heard the wife, Dean,” he said, pulling the tool from the bag at his feet and walking closer to the back of the house.The man on the roof—Dean—picked his way downward, coming more clearly into view as he descended below the roofline. When he dropped to his stomach and stretched out a hand for the hammer, Castiel’s breath seized in his lungs for a moment. Dean was, for lack of a better descriptor, beautiful. No, “beautiful” was inadequate. A half-remembered verse of Donne flitted through his mind: _If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee._ Not that his experience included many instances of “getting,” but the point held.

“Thanks, Sammy,” Dean said, rising to his feet again. He lifted his forearm to wipe away the light perspiration dotting his brow, and at the sight of the bicep flexing with the movement, Castiel suddenly recalled himself. _Staring like an idiot, practically drooling—what am I doing?_ Clearing his dry throat, he turned quickly to Sarah. “Is there anything I can assist with before supper? I’m happy to help.” He felt the flush burning his cheeks and hoped it could be blamed on the walk there.

“That’s sweet, but I’ve got all that in hand,” she said, nodding in approval. “You can just come in and make yourself at home, if you like. These two will come join us when they finish up, and the boys should be along shortly, too.” He followed behind her through the back door into a cozy kitchen, where he inhaled appreciatively, enjoying the aroma of stewing chicken and vegetables.

\---

“I think that was the new schoolteacher,” Sam said, voice raised to be heard over the tapping of the hammer. Dean was in a good mood, pleased to find that the shingle Sam had thought was curling was actually just loose and out of place. He tacked it back firmly in place, then stood.

“Seems young,” he said. He’d barely got a glimpse at the man before he and Sarah had gone inside. There had been a quick impression of wind-tousled dark hair and startled eyes, but they’d been standing in the shade of the house and Dean’s eyes hadn’t adjusted from the sun brightness in time to get a better look. “Did he have a squeaky voice like Jesse said?”

“Jesse said he had—? Never mind. No, he didn’t squeak. From what I heard, sort of the opposite. All done up there?” Sam stepped toward the ladder propped against the roof, intending to move it toward where Dean was heading. Rather than wait, Dean sat down and scooted toward the edge, gripped with his hands and twisted his body as he slid off and hung for a moment, then dropped to the ground with a thud. Sam huffed and shook his head as he watched. “You know, Jack and Jesse are probably watching from somewhere right now. If one of them tries that and breaks a leg, they’ll tell Sarah where they got the idea.”

“Huh. Well, too late now,” Dean replied sheepishly. “Let me wash up a bit, and then we’ll head in.” The brothers headed to the communal water pump so Dean could rinse his hands and face, and then they made their way back, hunger spurring their steps a little.

The scene that greeted them as they entered the house was unusually cozy. The boys, perhaps encouraged by their teacher’s presence to be on their best behavior, were busily setting the table; Sarah was loading up serving dishes that steamed enticingly. In a rocking chair at the side of the room, out of the way of the bustle, sat the man Dean had seen earlier, with little Mary cuddled in his lap. The man was reading to her in a quiet but expressive voice from a tiny book he held in one hand, and Mary was staring at the pages as though they held the secrets of the universe.

Dean slowed, stopping inside the door and taking in the picture. The general peace in the room allowed him to hear the words of the story being read: “Then crossing to where the Fish was standing, he said, ‘And this is A. Fish, Esq., the celebrated lecturer on the ‘Whichness of the What as compared with the Thatness of the Thus.’ He desired to accompany us here in order to find material for a new lecture which he is preparing upon the ‘Perhapness of the Improbable.’” The teacher lowered his voice dramatically for the character’s voice, which was actually pretty impressive, considering how gravelly his ordinary speaking voice seemed to be. Dean couldn’t help clearing his own throat in sympathy, which drew attention from the teacher, who looked up from the page.

Dean’s second impression of the new schoolteacher was much more powerful than the foretaste he’d gotten earlier. The man’s gaze, a glittering bright blue, bored through Dean like it could see his very soul, but he felt warmed rather than chilled by it. His jaw was shadowed with faint stubble, and his tie had been twisted front to back by Mary’s exploring hands. The tousled hair he’d glimpsed in the yard was just as mussed as before, and it contrasted with his formal clothing in a way that almost hinted at roguishness. Somehow, though, seeing the man snuggling Dean’s sweet little niece, rocking her and reading to her with such attentiveness, punched Dean in the gut just as hard as the unbelievable arousal unexpectedly coursing through his system.

_Oh_ , he thought, utterly unable to summon any actual coherency.

He almost jumped out of his skin when Sam’s hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Get your own, Dean,” Sam said, and Dean spun to stare, gulping. Before he could stammer out any sort of protest, Sam went on, “But I suppose you’d have to stick with one girl for more than a few Sunday suppers for that, right?”

“Right,” Dean mumbled, then shook himself a little before pasting a cheeky grin on his face. “Anyway, where would I put any little scamps around my place? On the roof?” He winked at his nephews, who were giggling.

The mood became a great deal livelier now that all family members had arrived. Sam stepped close to Sarah to steal a kiss, and she thumped him on the chest, blushing as she nodded toward their company. “Sam, please. This is the boys’ new teacher, Mr. Castiel Novak. Castiel, this giant here is my husband, Samuel. That’s Dean, his brother.”

Castiel had stood, lifting Mary along with him, and held out his hand to shake both brothers’ hands. Dean noted that despite the lack of work-hardened callouses common to the grips of most men he knew, the teacher’s handshake was respectably strong. When they released hands, he almost regretted the loss of the warm contact. Inwardly, he was screaming, berating himself for whatever the hell he was doing. He turned quickly and teasingly ruffled Jesse’s curls, desperate to hide any traces of his thoughts that might be visible in his expression.

“How are you liking the school here?” Sam asked politely, gesturing to a seat at the table and lifting his daughter into his own arms. Dean found himself sitting across the table, bracketed by his nephews, who were both eager to sit next to him.

“Well, it’s my first teaching job, so I don’t really have much to which I could compare it,” Castiel said apologetically. “But for the most part, I can’t complain. It’s tiring work, but I imagine that part should improve with practice.”

“And the students?” Sam asked, pointedly eying his sons as he did.

Castiel paused, glancing at the boys himself, then smiled. “We’re getting to know each other.”

Sam made a grumbling sound in his throat and narrowed his eyes a little. Jesse became suddenly very interested in the casserole dish in front of him on the table.

“Jack,” Sarah interjected. “Why don’t you say grace for the table?” Happy for the change in conversation, Jack quickly bowed his head and began to recite the standard prayer. Not paying much attention to that, Dean took advantage of the opportunity to study Castiel a little more. With his head lowered and eyes closed, the laugh lines around his eyes smoothed a bit, and he looked younger than before. Unlike Sam and Sarah, he hadn’t folded his hands in front of him, and his lips were twitching a little; Dean wondered what thoughts were running through his head just then. He wasn’t a particularly devout man himself, and he found himself hoping that Castiel wasn’t some sort of Bible-thumper.

Jack said, “Amen,” and everyone lifted their heads before Dean could pull his gaze away. Castiel met his eyes, and there was a moment in which they simply sat staring at each other. Sam coughed, and the spell was broken.

“Dean, man, pass that cornbread,” Sam said, and plates began being passed and filled. Sam reached for the large spoon in the serving dish. “Chicken, Mr. Novak?”

“Castiel, please,” the teacher replied, then smirked. “Will you be throwing it, like the hammer?”

Dean guffawed loudly, then flushed at the awkward noise. Castiel glanced quickly at him, but his expression was pleased. Sam snickered too, rolling his eyes good-naturedly.

The meal was a little awkward, with the Winchester family trying to find a balance between the respectful setting they felt they should be showing the new teacher and the earthy casualness with which they usually ate. A teacher wasn’t a preacher, but there was a definite similarity of feel, and it made things a little tense in spots. “So, is ‘Castiel’ a family name?” Sarah asked.

Castiel wrinkled his nose slightly. “In a way. It’s the name of a little-known angel, or at least little-known for most people around here. My family has a tradition of using Biblical names. We’ve got a large extended family, though, and my father was a youngest son on top of that, so many of us were faced with either the fate of being the family’s seventh ‘Michael’ or else having names drawn from apocrypha and niche texts. I’m apparently the ‘Angel of Thursday,’ which I suppose at least carries less pressure than my archangel older brothers.”

“I like it,” Dean offered, then fidgeted a little awkwardly when Castiel raised a skeptical eyebrow. “No, really. Anyway, better an unknown angel than, say, a devil or a demon.”

Castiel huffed a laugh, relaxing. “I’ll ask my Uncle Lucifer, see what his opinion is.” Dean wasn’t sure whether he was being teased, but the conversation topic changed and he couldn’t find a graceful way to ask after that.

The children made the supper table talk somewhat better, peppering their teacher with questions. Jack proudly told them that Mr. Novak had grown up all the way north in Pennsylvania, which drew an impressed whistle from Jesse before Sarah chastised him. “You must be homesick,” she then said. “Must be hard, being so far away from family.” The look on Castiel’s face didn’t seem to support that idea, in Dean’s opinion, but he simply nodded.

“Got a girl back home waiting for you?” Sam asked, lightly speculative. Dean wanted to protest on behalf of the man; it was no fun being interrogated about being single by every new person a man happened to meet, though at least he didn’t have to deal with that himself so often anymore, since most people around town had given up. Instead, he kept his lips firmly together, unsure exactly why he was so desperate to know the answer to Sam’s question. It wasn’t as if he could…

“No,” Castiel said tersely. “No one special.” He lifted his cup to drink deeply, and it was clear that no more was forthcoming on the subject. A little of the light in Castiel’s eyes seemed to have dimmed, as well, and Dean felt the loss keenly. Maybe there had been a bad relationship whose ending had left a mark on the man’s heart; Dean was familiar with that pain. Or perhaps it was something else. Maybe the deep, powerful loneliness inside Dean, the kind that ached even when he was surrounded by family and friends, was something Castiel might understand. Even if that sort of shared understanding was all he could hope to take away from this, it would be something.

When the plates had been scraped clean of the last bit of gravy and the children had been set to their evening chores, Castiel cleared his throat in a way that seemed to indicate his imminent departure. Sarah tried to protest before he had even said the words. “Oh, no, you don’t have to go running off just yet. Sit for a while, let your supper hit bottom.” Sam added agreement, pushing back from the table and folding his hands over his own stomach.

“I’d love to stay and enjoy your company longer, but I’m afraid that I do have to be getting home,” Castiel said with reluctance. “I should take advantage of the last of the sunlight, if I can, as well as my own energy. There are still some boxes to unpack, to my shame, and I need to see to a few maintenance issues with the house itself. They seem small enough, but I want to make sure I’m not missing anything important.”

“You’re over on Scotch Road, aren’t you?” Dean asked, thinking. “Fourth house on the left?” At Castiel’s nod, Dean sighed. “That’s the McCoy house, or was. Anse got himself killed a couple months ago, careless with his powder. It was a miracle he didn’t take his entire team along with him. I’m not at all surprised to hear he’d be as sloppy with his house as he was about his work. Liked his drink, too, more than most. Kind of a shame; his wife did her best, but there was only so much she could do.”

“Four young children,” Sarah murmured. She looked so sad that Sam reached over and grabbed her hand to squeeze it.

“Anyway, not to speak ill of the dead, but the house…they all had to clear out pretty quick after Anse died, and I doubt the mine owners did a thing to fix up the place before you moved in. If you want, I’d be happy to come take a look at it, too. Got a lot of experience with the houses around here, and all the ‘personality’ they can have.” That was putting it mildly. When Benny moved out of his folks’ house and into his own, he and Dean had spent weeks plastering the inside of walls, the cracks in which had been large enough to see clearly through to the yard, and pulling rodent nests out of a chimney that had spewed black soot into the kitchen the first time Benny had tried to light his stove.

Castiel looked surprised and a little unsure at the offer. “That…that’s very generous of you,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Better go along with it,” Sam told Castiel with a chuckle. “It’ll just be worse if you tell him he can’t help. Dean’s worse than anyone I’ve ever met about fretting over other people’s problems.” Dean’s cheeks burned at the teasing, but Sam wasn’t wrong. He knew he’d just met the man, but he already felt pained by the idea of letting Castiel struggle, trying to fix up his place all on his own.

After a few moments, the internal conflict seemed to pass, and Castiel smiled ruefully. “All right, then. I won’t turn down an expert’s advice. And, actually, there is one other area in which I’d be thrilled for some assistance.” He glanced around at the rest of the family. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare cat on hand, would you?” When the brothers looked at each other in confusion, Castiel laughed hard at their baffled faces. At the mirthful sound, which transformed the deep and gravelly voice into something wild and unreserved in its joy, Dean felt something loose in his heart slip into place, and he understood.

\---

“So,” Dean said as the two men trudged down the path, the descending sun making their barely-visible shadows grow long ahead of them. “This place must be pretty different from what you’re used to.” He kept his gaze ahead of him, trying to push down the near-constant urge to turn his eyes toward Castiel.

“In some ways, it is,” Castiel agreed. “My family was involved in the building industry, not mining, but there’s plenty of coal in Pennsylvania, too. More than a few of my childhood acquaintances left school and their homes early to go find work in one mine or another.” He kicked at the dirt, and Dean noted that even though most of the clothing he wore was formal, suitable for sitting behind a desk and looking respectable, his feet were protected by plain, durable boots.

“That’s rough,” Dean said. “At least the boys working in our mine get to go home to their mothers and fathers at night. They don’t have to give up home when they give up being kids.”

“Well, some of them didn’t mind so much.” Castiel frowned, remembering. “Leaving behind the house where you grew up isn’t so painful if the only thing really making it a ‘home,’ honestly, is having spent an extended length of time there.” He sighed softly, gaze turned inward.

Dean was quiet for a few minutes, a little worried about overstepping himself. “I get that,” he eventually said. “I didn’t move out on my own until I was twenty-two, when Sam got married, but it hadn’t been what I’d call ‘home’ for a long while before that. I stayed because Sam was still there, and because it was easier not to split my pay between two households, not because of any sentimental reasons.”

Castiel looked at him quizzically. “Why did you need to support your younger brother? It’s admirable, but…forgive me if I’m prying. I merely wondered.”

Dean bit his lip, trying to pull back whatever defensive expression had crossed his face at the question. “No, it’s okay. You can ask. My dad…he wasn’t a bad guy, but I guess you could say he had his demons. Sometimes they got the better of him. Happened more often after Mom got sick and passed.” He felt his jaw clench for a moment. This wasn’t something he ever talked about, and most people had grown up alongside him and knew just enough to want to steer clear of the subject. “No way could I have afforded to rent anything more than one of the bachelor cabins, and cramming both myself and a teenage boy into one of those wasn’t a workable plan. But leaving him there on his own, trusting Dad to be able to take care of them both…” He let the sentence trail away. Truthfully, he didn’t even like to follow that line far enough through his imagination to guess how it would have ended.

Castiel seemed to know that a perfunctory expression of sympathy or a shallow praise for Dean’s sense of brotherly duty wouldn’t be welcomed just then, so he simply nodded in mute understanding, lifting a palm to gently clap Dean on the back of his shoulder. They walked in comfortable silence for a few minutes, before Castiel spoke up again. “My situation wasn’t so complicated. There were lots of us, but no real sense of closeness. I was always much quieter and out of place among my brothers, so when Father died and we all began to drift away, there was no real motivation for them to stay in contact. We were almost strangers, and now we might as well be.” He shrugged and added, “I’m not even sure all of them knew I finished school, and perhaps only my brother Gabriel knows I moved here, unless he bothered to tell anyone else.”

“So you’re…” Dean bit back the word he’d been about to say, but Castiel caught it anyway.

“Alone? Essentially. You’re lucky to be so close to your brother and his family. I’m a bit envious.” The slight sadness touching his voice was painful to hear, but at the same time, Dean took comfort. Castiel did understand, after all.

“Yeah, I couldn’t imagine living away from Sam, but, you know, it’s different. He’s got his own family now.”

Castiel raised an eyebrow. “You’re still his family, too,” he said. “I’m sure he’d say the same.”

Grimacing, Dean shook his head. “Yeah, but…I’m his past, maybe part of his present. Sarah and the kids are his future,” he tried to clarify. It hurt to say it out loud, but he knew it was the truth of the situation.

Castiel turned thoughtful. “Being part of someone’s present, though…that’s a valuable thing,” he said slowly, seeming to process the words carefully before he spoke them. It didn’t feel like he was trying to avoid hurt feelings, but more that he wanted to make certain that he said exactly what he meant. “Living in the moment with someone, sharing experiences and life together…you know, you can never count on a future, or anything beyond this day, right now, but the present moment is the solid earth beneath your feet, holding you up as you walk. And you get to walk together.” He smiled, proud of the metaphor.

“Huh,” Dean said. Rolling the idea around in his head, he liked the way it felt. God knew the truth of how uncertain the future could be, though applying that truth to himself had always been easier than doing it toward his brother. “Well, then…I’m glad we got to share this walk tonight,” he said, biting his lip at how the words came out sounding more intimate that he’d intended, but not wishing to take them back. Castiel’s face flushed a bit as his smile widened, his expression flattered, and Dean wanted to make that happen again and again.

_What the hell are you doing?_ he asked himself. But he knew damn well what he was doing, or at least the feelings driving it. The real question was _why_ he was letting himself be so open, compared to a lifetime of covert glances and denied impulses. What on earth, after only a few hours of acquaintanceship, had him wanting to throw away caution and behave recklessly, open himself up to…God, he didn’t even know. But he wasn’t sure he wanted it to stop, which was as terrifying as it was exhilarating.

The poor condition of the roof was visible even in the evening light and from a distance. Dean whistled low. “Yeah, that’s issue number one,” he said. “How’re your shingling skills, Cas?”

“Nonexistent,” came the dubious-sounding reply. ”I assume it’s not just nailing pieces of wood together, though?”

“Not at the point you’re at, man,” Dean sighed. “I’d bet you’re having leaks already, or will be soon?”

Castiel nodded glumly. “I was rather hoping it would be as simple as patching plaster and covering the hole, but…”

“But nothing,” Dean said. “Even if you did that, there’s got to be at least four or five spots I can see that are either already leaking or ready to start. Better to catch them before they do, if we can. Don’t worry, I have a buddy who works at the saw mill in Piney River, and he can cut us a deal on some replacement shakes—cheaper shingles. They work just fine. If you really want to save money, you could split your own, but you’ll be chopping for weeks.”

Castiel looked at his hands and sighed. “Well, I might need to, much as I dread the prospect.”

“We’ll get you there, don’t worry too much,” Dean tried to reassure him. “Let’s look at the rest of the place before we get too upset.”

Thankfully, the other obvious issues didn’t appear nearly as bad. The traps had done their grisly duty and been redeployed, and the floors had been rigorously swept of crumbs and scraps that might attract more pests. Dean snorted a laugh at the hole in the floor. “That was likely Anse’s doing,” he explained. “Probably kept his moonshine under a loose board, which eventually broke from being lifted so often. Or else somebody came looking for his stash after he died and the family left.” Repairing the hole wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, Dean figured, once they started.

“Your stove and chimney working all right? Windows not leaking?” he checked, and Castiel nodded affirmatively. “Then I think you’re pretty lucky, and we can start on the floor tomorrow. I’ll come by after my shift. Should I run home for my tools first, or do you have all that?” He’d have felt embarrassed asking that question, since most self-respecting men he knew would have been offended at the implication that they weren’t equipped for their own home repairs, but he honestly had no idea what a teacher’s background might include in that regard.

“Dean, that’s too much,” Castiel protested. “You don’t need to do all of this. I feel like I’m taking advantage of your kindness.”

_I want you to,_ Dean thought, filled with strange impulses. Outwardly, he just winked cheekily. “Not taking advantage if it’s freely offered,” he said. “Anyway, it’s selfish of me, too, or at least on behalf of my brother. Can’t have the new teacher falling through his own floor, or they might not send us another one.”

They both laughed at that, tension broken. Then, running a hand along his stubbled jaw thoughtfully, Castiel tilted his head and studied Dean. “Earlier, you called me Cas,” he stated.

“Oh,” Dean said, caught unprepared and a little flustered. “Is it…do you not like that? I tend to nickname, just a habit. If you don’t want me to, I—”

“No, it’s fine, it’s…fine,” Cas cut in, reassuring. “I don’t think anybody’s ever given me a nickname before. That’s strange, isn’t it? As much as people remark on or tease about my given name, nobody calls me by anything else.”

“Stupid thing to tease a man over. Not like any of us get to pick our names,” said Dean, a little indignant on Cas’s behalf. “And it’s not even a bad name, either. I used to live next door to a kid named Epaphroditus.” They chuckled together again, and Dean mentally congratulated himself on not repeating how much he actually liked the sound of Castiel’s name.

“Well, then,” Cas said, “I suppose I’ll count my blessings. My name is better than that of poor young Epaphroditus, and I have…good friends, who’ll not mock me, and who will keep me from being killed by my house.” He held out a hand, looking hopeful, and Dean tried not to melt as he took it and shook firmly.

“Good friends,” he agreed wholeheartedly.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, researching my family tree, I found a distant uncle named Epaphroditus, and now I sort of feel like my family dropped the ball by passing down the names Morgan and Prudence over and over but neglecting Epaphroditus. Eppie? Pappy? It's just so damn versatile!
> 
> Moonshine was definitely a thing in the area. My grandpa remembers areas of the woods near my hometown where he knew never to go playing, because moonshiners would have shot him dead without hesitation. (And never mind that his grandpa was one, too.) They called it the "white mule."


	3. Chapter 3

“Help me understand, Dean,” Alistair said, words drawling slow as molasses, his voice thick with irritation. “It’s almost seven o’clock, and the mine yard is full of men standing idle. I see clean faces, Dean. Clean faces, not blackened ones, faces that have been busy pulling coal out of the ground. Can you help me understand why that would be?”

In fact, the yard wasn’t “full.” There were only a handful of teams still waiting to enter the mine and begin their day’s labor. Those faces, too, were watching with impatience, since every minute that passed with their feet still above ground was a minute that they weren’t earning pay. Dean got that, and he had no desire to hold things up without a damn good reason.

“Black damp,” Dean bit off succinctly. “Three chambers along the west side of Morgan, all ripe with it. If you’d rather deal with the amount of time we’d have to shut down production to haul out three teams’ worth of dead men, then by all means, let’s send them in before my crew clears the air.” He gestured toward the entrance, knowing the reaction he’d get. The men who happened to be within earshot looked grim. Alistair started to sneer, then caught himself, feeling the weight of their audience’s eyes. He turned to walk back toward the operations building, jerking his head to signal that he wanted Dean to follow.

“Of course, nobody wants to see men die,” Alistair sighed, doing a poor job at feigning sympathy. Now that Dean knew him better, he couldn’t believe he’d ever been taken in by the man’s kind words, that he’d bought into the blatantly false compassion. “But you have to see things from the other perspective. If the company doesn’t make a profit, we have to cut corners. When we cut corners, it comes out of people’s pockets. We all need to look at the big picture, Dean.”

It sounded so logical, but Dean knew damn well that it wouldn’t be Alistair’s pockets that felt the pinch. He also knew that if the owners imagined that they could rationalize paying laborers any less, they wouldn’t feel any need to defend that move with wistful explanations. “I don’t know what you expect me to do, sir,” he said. “I can’t make the repairs go any faster, and I’m only doing what you hired me to do when I find the things that need to be repaired. Corpses are bad for business, too.”

“Mmm,” Alistair hummed, noncommittal in his reaction to the statement. “It’s something to consider, isn’t it, though? If the flame dies in the air, then matters are clear, but if it only flickers? Perhaps judgment calls can be a little less…judgmental.” He smiled slyly, in case Dean missed the insinuation. Dean gritted his teeth, making his own grunt that was neither agreement or argument.

“Oh, by the way,” Alistair called as Dean turned to stalk back toward the mine, “I meant to say, but it almost slipped my mind. I saw your brother with his little boy the other day. Jesse, isn’t it?” His slow smile was positively sinister. “Getting so big,” he said, voice teasing, singing. “It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it? Just the blink of an eye. Blink again, and those little boys will be sniffing around for work.”

The threat slithered up Dean’s spine, dragging ice in its wake. He was trapped, and judging from how Alistair’s grin got even wider, they both knew it.

\---

That night, as Dean shaped the new floorboard to the size of the hole where the damaged one had been, he couldn’t stop hearing Alistair’s voice in his head. It never ended; Alistair had too much to hold over his head for Dean to ever be able to resist what he was told to do. The debt he owed for keeping Sam safe, for getting him into his own better job—it all had allowed Alistair to weave little threads of control in the parts of Dean’s life that were most precious to him. It was his own fault.

Cas had made bean soup with bits of salt pork, and it simmered on the stovetop as they worked, filling the house with delicious smells. It should have felt comforting, but Dean couldn’t relax enough to appreciate it. Fortunately, Castiel seemed to sense his mood, and rather than trying to force him to talk about what had upset him, as Sam might have done, he held back and tried to allow Dean his space to work in peace. It was exactly what Dean needed, and yet he still felt guilty for the necessity. _Just one more way you always wind up messing things up for the people around you,_ he berated himself. A moment later, when he missed the nail he was pounding into the board and hit his thumb instead, he snapped.

“God damn it!” he shouted, dropping the hammer and slapping his other hand hard against the floor. “God _fucking_ damn it!” Panting, he closed his eyes, crouching on hands and knees. He was immediately filled with embarrassment for his overreaction, and he was a little afraid to look up and see Cas’s response. As a result, he startled and jerked a bit when his hand was gently lifted and pried open.

“Let me see, please,” Cas said, running his fingers along Dean’s. “I don’t think you hit it hard enough to split your thumbnail. I wish I had the old icebox from my father’s house, so I could give you something cold to put on it, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait a few months until the first snows arrive.” He spoke quietly, but there was a trace of humor at the end. Dean didn’t deserve any of it.

“Cas, stop,” he muttered, pulling his hand away as calmly as his shaken nerves would allow. “Why are you being like this? Why are you doing it?”

“Doing what?” Castiel asked, looking at him evenly.

“Letting me be an ass!” Dean growled. He was pissed—pissed at Alistair, pissed at himself, and, perversely, now a little pissed at Cas for not calling him out on it and standing up for himself. He was a complete mess.

Cas just shrugged, unflinching under Dean’s glare. “I suppose I’m just familiar enough with what it’s like to get lost in the darkness of my own thoughts to know there’s no point in somebody else trying to haul you out. Of course, my own gloom tends to manifest in too much alcohol and binging on morbid poetry until I’m a useless, soggy lump, but the point stands.”

Exhaling heavily, Dean let himself flop backwards onto his bottom. He scrubbed his face with his hands and chuckled humorlessly. “Well, I’m well-acquainted with that method, too, though I’m sure your poems trump mine. And you’re right, but I’m still sorry. Sorry for yelling, and sorry you had to see it. It’s one of those times where I’m not fit to be in polite company.”

“Well, that’s your first mistake, Dean,” Cas said with a smile. “It’s my house, so I don’t count as company. And I’ve often considered politeness to be a giant waste of energy that could be put to better use.” Picking up the hammer, he tapped at the side of the now slightly bent nail Dean had been hammering, jutting half out of the board. When it was straightened, he drove it into the wood with two solid blows.

Dean watched, letting his mind settle a little. “Sam should take a lesson,” he said. “He’s always been one to, like you said, try to drag me out. Make me talk about what’s bothering me. I try to tell him, ‘Man, if I wanted to talk, I know where you are,’ but he doesn’t get it.”

“Brothers,” Castiel commiserated. Dean made a questioning sound. Cas explained, “I mentioned that I had one brother who knows I’m living here now? Gabriel has always been far more invested in my personal life than is appropriate. Then again, he gets bored easily, so maybe it’s just that it takes more lives than merely his own to keep him entertained. Still, he did loan me the money I needed to get started here, and he’s been the rare support to me for the past several years, so I grant him some latitude in that respect. He gets letters, little tidbits that give him just enough to reassure him that I’m not turning demented.”

“My brother would probably argue I’ve already reached that point,” Dean joked. Castiel rolled his eyes playfully, and they continued working. With relief, Dean realized that Cas meant exactly what he’d said, that he had no intention of prying, even delicately, at the source of Dean’s mood. He found, ironically, that now he actually wanted to talk a bit more, even if they avoided the particular fears burning in his gut.

“So does your brother get on you about not being married yet?” Dean asked. It wasn’t the question he wished he could ask, but he didn’t feel confident enough to ask Castiel directly how he himself felt about the matter, or whether it was something he even wanted.

“Not really. Not since…” Cas paused. He eyed the board, then mumbled something about splinters before getting up to rummage for sandpaper in Dean’s bag. When he turned back to the repair work, he seemed a little more collected. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever even come close to any sort of permanent relationship, but there was…once, in my first year away from home at school, when things went unexpectedly badly, in a dramatic fashion, and Gabriel helped pick up the pieces. Not that I asked him to, but, well.” He kept his eyes averted, lips tightening with recalled pain.

“I know what that’s like,” Dean sympathized. “Thank God, when I’ve had to go through that, at least I didn’t have to work with them after. Can’t imagine how it felt if you had to keep facing the person who broke your heart, day after day.”

“No, it certainly didn’t make things any easier,” Castiel muttered. “Whenever he—er, people, I mean…it was…yes, it was awkward. Very.” He licked his lips and blinked when he finished stammering to the end of his thought. His fingertips were white from the force he was using to push the sandpaper across the wood.

Dean was not stupid. He’d heard the masculine pronoun, and it was only thanks to divine intervention that he had restrained any sort of facial or verbal reaction. The way Castiel had practically come apart at the seams trying to cover up the slip was an undeniable sign that he had never meant for Dean to hear it, and as much as Dean’s heart was pounding with the urge to respond, he knew he needed to respect that.

“Well, it’s probably good you did have your brother to help, then, but I completely understand hating it when folks stick their noses into your personal affairs,” Dean said instead, determinedly keeping his tone light. “Support’s important, of course, but a man’s private business is his own, long as it’s not hurting anybody else, and he ought to be able to keep it that way.” He ran his palm over the surface Cas had sanded, nodding in approval at the smooth texture. “Anyway, that’s what I think, and it’s the way plenty of folks around here think, too. We’ve got too many different kinds of people from too many different countries and backgrounds to worry about trying to figure out everybody else.”

Castiel hummed, acknowledging Dean’s reassurance without sounding reassured. He stood and retrieved his broom to sweep away the sawdust in silence. His brow was still slightly furrowed, and his shoulders were visibly tense.

Packing away his tools, Dean decided he needed to go a little further. “I mean, sure, there’s always a few people who can’t help snooping and jawing. Honest, I’ve never understood how some folks can get so wrapped up in ‘thou shalt nots’ that they forget the whole ‘judge not lest’ part.” He hoisted the bag and went to drop it in the corner, hoping he wasn’t saying too much and making things even worse. “People like that…I can’t stand ‘em, and I don’t hold with ‘em. You don’t ever have to worry about any of that bullshit from me.” Dean met Castiel’s eyes and held them as he said it, hoping to make the truth of his statement crystal clear.

Their shared gaze lasted long heartbeats before Cas exhaled and nodded, still somewhat dubiously but less skeptical than before. Dean released his own breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, as well. The moment had been critical, he thought, and he was unsure whether he’d managed to come out on the right side or the wrong, but he’d done his best. Most importantly, Cas looked more relaxed and less terrified. More than anything, Dean realized—certainly, more than any of the unrealistic dreams he might have ever had and dismissed—he just wanted Cas to know that he could trust Dean, to feel safe with him. To feel safe, in general.

They were both starving when they sat down to the bowls of soup that Cas dished out for them, along with slabs of cornbread that Sarah had sent over. Dean moaned around the first bite; Sarah had a way with cornbread that probably broke at least a few of Pastor Jim’s commandments. He blushed a little when he looked up and saw Castiel smirking at him. “That good?” he said.

“See for yourself,” Dean said. A moment later, Cas was the one groaning, and Dean couldn’t deny the rush of heat he felt at the noise.

“Your sister-in-law is a kitchen _saint_ ,” Castiel declared fervently.

“I was just thinking sort of the same thing, only crediting the diabolical instead of the divine,” Dean laughed.

Cas shook his head. “Better not, at least not where anyone might hear. I don’t want any inquisitions getting started, putting my access to this bread in jeopardy.” He shoved another bite into his mouth and let his eyes roll upward in exaggerated ecstasy.

There was perhaps a truth to the idea of kitchen magic, because the last traces of tension seemed to vanish as if by hocus-pocus. Castiel was smiling easily again, and the irritating knot of Dean’s own worries from earlier seemed to loosen. “Sorry again about being a bear earlier,” he said, dredging a hunk of bread through the thick soup. “I had a lot of crap on my mind.”

“You don’t owe me any kind of explanation,” Cas reminded him firmly, but Dean sighed, waving the words away.

“No, I know I don’t. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad about not giving one,” he said. “I just…part of it is just me not wanting to dump any of my problems on anybody else, but the other part is more complicated. If it was just me being unhappy, I think I could make myself be okay with letting others try to help, but it’s…well, it’s harder than that. It’s…not safe.”

Castiel’s face had gone grim. “Dean, if you’re in any sort of danger—”

“Not like that,” Dean hastily cut in. “Or, well, not exactly like that.” Cas looked even more stormy, and Dean searched his mind for a way of explaining without actually explaining. “There’s just some folks around here with some weight to throw around who really get a charge off of that, using that power just to make other people cringe a bit. You shouldn’t have too much trouble with them, since you’re tucked away in the school. Make sure to watch your back, though, okay? There can be a fine line between not crossing folks like that and winding up beholden to them, once you’re in their sights.”

“I’ve known men like that,” Castiel acknowledged. “Some women, too.”

“Yeah, well, then you know. All the good things they’ll promise you? They always come with so many strings attached, you’ll wind up wearing them as a noose.”

Dean was abruptly no longer hungry. He put down his spoon and rested his elbows on the table, supporting his forehead against his hands. He heard Castiel push back his chair and stand, gathering their bowls and utensils to put into the dish basin. Then Cas came back to sit, waiting quietly for Dean to talk or not, as he saw fit. There was no sense of impatience, and eventually Dean spoke again, without lifting his head.

“I don’t want to name names, since the last thing I want to do is pull anybody else into this, especially not…my friends.” _Especially not you, Cas._ “Long time ago, I got caught between a rock and a hard place, even if I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew is that I wanted to protect the folks I love, and I didn’t think too hard about the fine print. Now I’m just hoping I’ll break even in the end, if that makes sense at all. Didn’t have much of a choice at the time, but…man, if only I’d searched a little harder, maybe I could have found something.”

Castiel didn’t say anything until it was clear Dean was finished. Then he reached forward, lightly gripping Dean’s forearm. “Thank you for trusting me with that, Dean,” he said seriously. “I can tell you’ve been holding that close to your chest for a long time. It’s perhaps not my place to say so, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I overstep, but I’m sure those loved ones you were protecting would hate to know that you were agonizing in silence on their behalf. They’d probably prefer to shoulder their own worries, or at least help ease the weight.”

Dean was already adamantly shaking his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “My choices belong on my back, not theirs. If they ever knew, they’d just get upset. They wouldn’t understand.” He could just imagine his brother’s face if he found out that Dean had put himself in debt to Alistair just to keep Sam safe from mine collapses, poisonous gases, or any of the other hazards of laboring under the ground.

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Cas agreed. “I won’t try to second-guess. But I will say that you look at least somewhat less burdened for having shared part of your concerns with me. For that, I’m thankful. And I’m happy to be here to listen whenever you need to unburden yourself a little more, Dean.” He squeezed Dean’s arm briefly, then released it. “Do you drink coffee after your evening meal?” he offered in a lighter tone.

“Wish I could. I love the stuff,” Dean said ruefully. “But I have to get up so damn early, so I can be done my inspections before the teams head down to work, that I have to be able to fall asleep the moment my head hits a pillow. I should probably be heading back so I can do just that, actually.”

“Then next time, I’ll make sure to have picked some of the chamomile I saw growing on the slope behind the school, so I can make you a nice tea that won’t disrupt your sleep schedule,” Castiel suggested, then laughed at Dean’s expression of disgust.

\---

As he walked home in the moonlight, the sounds of the katydids humming around him, Dean reflected on just how little time it had taken for Cas to become rooted in his life. He was swiftly becoming one of Dean’s closest friends—perhaps the closest, period. He’d known Benny for almost his entire life, since they were too young to have gone to school even if the camp had had a teacher at the time, but there was no way he’d have considered telling Benny about the deal with Alistair. Making a connection with somebody so quickly wasn’t something Dean had ever done before, and putting his finger on what made Castiel the exception was proving difficult.

He was different from anybody else around here, from an entirely objective view. Even with the wide range of languages, beliefs, and customs that came from having so many immigrants living and employed in the town, there was a certain sameness to the miners and their families; after all, whether the lunch pails held cabbage rolls or country ham, it all went down the same when the men eating it were sitting together in the dark, laughing at the same crude jokes. Cas wasn’t part of that world, but he wasn’t part of the elevated group that owned and managed the company, either. He was something in between, and Dean was fascinated by him.

_By a man,_ his brain helpfully clarified, and, yes, that was also part of why Dean’s thoughts were so twisted inside-out. Of course, this wasn’t the first time his eyes had been caught by a handsome face or an appealingly wide set of masculine shoulders, but it was certainly the first time he’d done more than quickly glance and then look away. Never had any of those men been more than fodder for him and his hand to recall with pleasure before he crawled under his blankets at night. They _couldn’t_ be more. Dean hadn’t really _wanted_ them to be more; it wasn’t really worth the risk to even consider it. He had a bad enough time with his unfair reputation as a heartbreaker with the young women around camp. The truth, as usual, was far more tame than any of the stories that flitted around. How anybody thought he had time to find his way into as many beds as he supposedly had, he’d no clue, and never mind how he hadn’t been shot by an army of angry fathers and brothers.

So he’d never even been tempted to risk further gossip, and far worse, by letting his eyes settle on another man for longer than it took to say a polite hello, and that had been just fine, up until now. Now, when he sat across from Castiel at a supper table, or walked alongside him in the evening air, or knelt beside him, watching those gorgeous and capable hands run slowly over the wood, stroking softly…

Oh, he was going to get himself into such trouble. And he knew it well, because it was so much more than that. He didn’t just want to look at Cas; he wanted to talk to him, to hear him laugh or talk about his books or even just name the different kinds of dried beans he’d put in the soup, because only Castiel would put so much thought into the matter. Dean wanted to hear what Cas thought about his dreams and his fears; he wanted to hear about Cas’s dreams, too, and to chase away anything that gave him even a trace of worry. He wanted to wrap his arms around the man, to be himself wrapped up in turn, and to stay in that embrace for as long as Cas would let him. It was physical, sure, but it was so much more on top.

And Cas had said “he” when he talked about that past affair. In one word, Cas had—albeit accidentally—blown away one of the biggest reservations Dean had ever had when it came to considering pursuing any sort of, well, anything with another man. Admitting to himself the attraction he felt was difficult enough, but exposing himself to actual risk without any kind of guarantee that his flirtations would be met with something other than a punch in the face? And that would be just the start, he knew.

But…maybe. Maybe this time, the risk would be worth the potential reward. All he had to do was open his mouth and say something. He wished he was just a little more certain, and a lot more brave.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Black damp - one of the infamous "damps" of mining. Black damp is a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and it's very deadly. Other damps are afterdamp, firedamp, stinkdamp, and white damp. Has nothing to do with moisture; it's from the German word for vapor (dampf).
> 
> The idea of a lot of West Virginia culture embracing a "live and let live" philosophy is accurate, for a variety of reasons. I'll get into it more in the last "chapter."


	4. Chapter 4

Dean’s friend at the mill was not only able to give Castiel a good deal on inexpensive shingles, he’d been willing to work out a generous payment plan that allowed Cas to afford them. Cas suspected Dean had done more than a little persuading on his behalf, but he couldn’t prove anything, and Dean insisted that it was just testament to how good folks could be. Since he didn’t have to take the time to cut each shingle himself, Cas was able to get started on the repairs quickly. Dean came faithfully after his shift almost every day, scaling the ladder to join Cas on the roof with his own set of tools. Between the two of them, they managed to complete the work in what felt like no time at all, and Cas glowed with pride when he gazed upward at the smooth rows of shingles.

Enough time had passed, however, for a routine to be firmly established, and neither Dean nor Cas particularly cared to go back to spending their evenings alone just because there was no more hammering to be done. (Dean couldn’t believe the unintentional innuendo about hammering actually came out of his mouth; he was unbelievably grateful that Cas happened to have been occupied with checking his roast at the time and therefore too distracted to notice Dean turning beet red and choking on his own tongue.) Cas was fortunate that the only house available for rent when he had been hired was one meant for a family; bachelor cabins like Dean’s couldn’t even be said to have a kitchen, consisting of merely one small multi-purpose room. Dean had always disliked cooking for only himself, anyway, and it was one reason why he’d always been such a frequent fixture at his brother’s supper table. Contributing something from his own stove or larder to accompany the meals, or some of his scrip to pay for it, kept him from feeling like a freeloader. He was more than happy to extend that habit to suppers at Cas’s, though when he did, he found himself being dragged into actual assistance with cooking in a way that rarely happened at Sam’s.

Several times a week, Castiel wound up joining Dean at Sam’s for the evening. Cas did his best not to do this too often, at the risk that Jack and Jesse would become known as the teacher’s pets, but Dean was persuasive, and Sarah was certainly encouraging of the visits. She’d noted how her sons’ eyes would sparkle when they listened to stories about the wider world they’d never seen, especially Jack’s. The odds were pretty good that those tales would remain just tales, wonderful dreams in their heads, but one never knew for certain. Maybe one of her boys would grow up to want something more, and to want it enough to actually chase it.

Teaching in the little school did get easier as Castiel and the students grew accustomed to each other and to the routines. Over time, though, Cas started to note a trend that disturbed him. The bigger boys who had sat in the back of the classroom, who had irritated him with their small disturbances, were growing quieter, and that was mostly because there were slowly becoming fewer of them.

“Nello hasn’t been in all week,” he grumbled to Dean, poking at his plate. “When he did his recitation last week, I noticed how his voice was breaking and cracking. It feels like that’s the marker. Once their voices start changing, they disappear within the month. And they’re all down at the mine, working like grown men.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Dean said, sympathetic yet blunt. “Might help to know that those are actually the better cases. Nello’s almost fifteen, and he got a good few years of schooling in him. He’ll be okay. There are plenty of boys sitting on benches in the breaker sorting coal who are a lot younger than that, who might not have ever seen a book other than the big Bible in the church.”

“But…that’s against the law, isn’t it?” Cas protested. “I don’t know how it is in West Virginia, but in Pennsylvania, the boys had to be fourteen before they could be hired in the mines. My classmates—”

“Yeah, it’s technically the same here, but, see, nobody’s really keeping track of who was born when, right? Especially when mothers might not even speak English or use a doctor to help bring their babies. And even if the camp doctor does help, well, who pays his salary? The mine bosses are much happier when the records are flexible. This way, when a father wants his kid to get a job, he just goes down to the courthouse, gets a blank birth paper, and fills it in with whatever date makes his boy old enough to work.”

Cas was devastated. “How old were you, Dean?” he asked, and when Dean simply gazed at him with meaning and didn’t answer, he didn’t ask again.

It hurt Cas to see it happen, over and over, and even though it now made sense, seeing the older children’s lack of attention toward school subjects they knew weren’t going to feature heavily in their lives, he hated it all the same. He expressed that to Dean, lamenting how the boys didn’t seem to have any hopes or dreams.

“They do,” Dean disagreed insistently. “They just make themselves remember that they’re only dreams. Look, Cas, you need to get this. Lots of families around here, they can’t afford to think that way, even if they’d like to. It’s easy to have dreams when your belly is full and your shoes don’t pinch, all right?”

“Is that why Sam’s kids are all in sturdy boots, but you’ve got newspaper lining the bottoms of your shoes?” Cas said, pointing at the work boots sitting by the door to dry, where Dean had left them when he’d come traipsing in that night in the drizzle.

“Maybe,” Dean mumbled. “Kids grow fast.”

Despite everything he tried, all that he told himself over and over before falling into bed at night, Castiel had to admit the truth: he was falling in love. It was horrible. Love was supposed to be this marvelous, lovely feeling, but all he could feel, in the moments of clarity when he wasn’t actively floating in the warmth of Dean’s company, was either pining misery or quaking terror. The misery was born in the far more rational part of his mind, because he understood that everything he was feeling was entirely one-sided, and nothing would ever actually develop from it. Even so, Castiel couldn’t resist allowing himself to imagine. The way Dean’s eyes seemed to glow with happiness when they were together was no real proof of actual attraction; the way his freckled cheeks would fill with color when Cas mentioned any of the wonderful things about him—not flattering, merely pointing out the obvious—was a sign of humility, not growing intimacy. And if, when Cas had been reading a few of his favorite Whitman passages to him one evening, the weight of Dean’s gaze had felt positively _scorching_ …Cas knew, rationally, he shouldn’t be reading more into it. It wasn’t _real_. And it would be far, far safer for him to remember that, lest he slip and ruin everything.

But then he’d look at Dean again, and all clarity would fly. Just for a while, he thought, he could lie to himself. Just for a while, he could let himself pretend.

\---

The schoolhouse was sweltering in the late June heat. Castiel hadn’t considered that he’d still be teaching in the summer months. As it turned out, the mining company surprised him by weighing the benefits of a pacified work force, whose children were not running wild all over the camp, against the cost of supplementing the money the state was paying him to teach for the one hundred eighty days of his yearly contract, and they decided that they could scrounge together enough money to lengthen the school term for an extra month or two. The offer was predicated on the idea Castiel could maintain the attendance in the school, and so far, he’d managed it.

He hadn’t had any other real plans, anyway. Going home wasn’t really an option, though Gabriel and his wife would have welcomed him. He’d been talking with the manager of the company store about helping with bookkeeping, and he thought he might keep that option open for the future. He might be paid in scrip for that, rather than in dollars, but since it would go right back into the store manager’s cash box, Castiel didn’t really think it mattered much.

He wiped his brow surreptitiously with his shirt sleeve, feeling it bead up again with sweat right away. “Primary grades, when you’ve finished your spelling, you may go get a drink of water. Upper grades will have their turn after.” The scratching of pencils got perceptibly quicker with the children’s motivation.

The extra heat today meant that more students than usual had played hooky, sneaking to the nearby pond to swim instead. They’d be caught, of course; the mine run-off meant that the water was blacker than any water had a right to be, and the color would cling to their skin and hair when the swimmers emerged. The inevitability of punishment was worth the temporary relief on days like today, though. He scanned the tops of the students’ bowed heads, frowning when he saw Jack working next to an empty seat. Jesse was a likely candidate for sneaking off to swim, but going without his brother? Something felt off.

When the older students began to line up for their turn with the water dipper, Castiel sidled up to Jack. “Your brother isn’t with us today?” he questioned. Jack’s eyes widened, and he nearly squeaked when he tried to speak. Attempting then to look anywhere else but at his teacher’s face, he mumbled something barely audible about Jesse feeling ill that morning. It was an obvious lie, but the odder part was the look of panic Jack wore.

“What a shame,” Castiel murmured. “I was thinking of dropping by your house later this evening; I’ll have to make sure to bring your mother a copy of the lessons Jesse missed today. She won’t want him to fall behind.” Jack flinched at the words.

“You don’t have to!” he protested. “I…I’ll take his lessons! And you probably don’t want to come over, anyway. He’s real sick and it might be catching. So you shouldn’t come to dinner, either.”

And Cas knew. He knew, he knew, and he broke. And he was so very, very _angry._ After all of Dean’s efforts, all of his own, Jesse was turning his back on any chance of a different future, trading it in for a life of back-breaking, dangerous labor.

He hardly knew what he taught for the rest of the afternoon. Thankfully, nobody else seemed driven to think much, either, so they mindlessly stumbled through the remaining hours, continually glancing at the clock. It felt like a reflection of Castiel’s emotions when the sunlight abruptly faded in the last hour, taking with it the heat, as storm clouds began to roll past the classroom windows. By the time he was dismissing class, many of the students were already looking anxious about trying to race home quickly enough to avoid being drenched by the surprise deluge.

Wind whipped through Cas’s hair as he made his way down to the mine, burning with indignation and a thousand other feelings. The rain began to splat against his shoulders and head, sharp and stinging; within moments, it was falling so hard he could barely see. He didn’t even slow his steps.

He knew where most of the youngest boys of the mine worked, thanks to Dean’s occasionally appalling stories of his youth.The tall structure on the slope nearest to the mine entrance, with the road running up the hill to the upper part of the building, was the breaker. Inside, boys— _children_ —would be sitting on rough boards laid across sloped troughs, down which the freshly mined coal would be dumped. Those boys would drive their feet into the coal, slowing its descent; they would shove their hands into it, searching for rock that had been mixed in accidentally. Their fingers would bruise and bleed, and the rising dust from the coal would choke them, even through the bandanas they wore across their faces. Unlucky boys would lose fingers and hands to the belts pulling the coal along the tipples. Very unlucky ones might be pulled in entirely, with gruesome results.

Castiel strode up to the breaker, standing in the small shelter afforded by a protrusion overhead, and peered in a window, shading his eyes with his hands. He wouldn’t have been able to identify Jesse from any of the other small, slouched figures, if it weren’t for his jacket. Cas knew the old tan jacket with the red patch on the elbow; he knew it had been Jack’s, and he’d been there when Sarah had mended the elbow, using one of Sam’s discarded flannel shirts. Jesse had his cap pulled low over his face, either to keep dust from his eyes or out of nervousness at being here without permission, since Cas was convinced that neither Sam nor Sarah would have signed anything lying about Jesse’s age.

Castiel’s hands tightened into fists as he stood. Fully intent on confronting Jesse, the breaker boss, and anyone else involved in this outrage, he let his feet take him a few steps toward the breaker entrance before he came to a halt. Dean’s voice, loaded with gentle rebuke, echoed in his head. _Lots of these folks can’t afford dreams._ He saw young Nello’s face in his memory, grinning as he scratched at a face just beginning to think about growing stubble. _Easy to dream when your shoes don’t pinch._ Jesse, in his hand-me-down jacket with the patches, next to Jack, with his pants too short to reach past his upper ankles. _At least they got a few years’ schooling…at least, at least._

He was shivering, shaking. He stared through the window again, seeing how small some of the boys looked compared to the ones around them, how they all looked tiny when the breaker boss strolled past with his slate. The rain ran down his neck, dripping from his now numbly dangling hands, as the fabric of his clinging shirt grew too saturated to absorb any more water. Castiel didn’t even notice. His heart was breaking into a million pieces, and he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from filthy faces of children on the other side of the glass.

The sound of the rain and his own anguish kept him from hearing the approach of footsteps behind him.

“Such a waste.” The words were so close to an echo of his thoughts that at first Castiel didn’t realize that they’d come from a voice behind him. When he did process that fact, he tried to turn, but his legs felt stiff, and he nearly stumbled. The tall, skinny man holding an umbrella over his head smirked slightly, but he showed no other reaction. “It is a waste, isn’t it?” he said, eying Castiel up and down, taking in his sodden, shivering state. “All that money, all those long days of reading, writing, ‘rithmetic…” He chuckled. “It’s wasted on these little ill-bred bastards.”

Castiel couldn’t even respond. All his earlier anger had evaporated, and he stood silently, blinking away the drops sliding down his face, feeling every evil word cut through him like actual barbs.

“You’re their teacher,” the man said, tilting his head and studying Cas as though he were something distasteful. “Taking good money to lie to those boys and girls every day. You tell them that learning is important, that it means something. I imagine you must feel so frustrated, knowing how much of a fraud you are. It must _burn_. Is that why you came here? To see the truth, how pointless it all really is? Look at them, teacher. Look.”

Powerless to resist, Castiel turned back to the window. His reflection in the glass was unrecognizable to him. Beyond it, the boys dug, covered in black grime.

“That’s what real work is,” the man’s voice hissed in his ear, much closer. “You know, you’d be better off doing something worthwhile like that. Maybe if you come down to the office tomorrow, we can see about finding _you_ a job…as a breaker boy.”

“Hey!” called another, much more familiar voice, accompanied by the sound of splashing, quick footsteps. Castiel felt the taller man’s body move away from his, leaving a chill in its place. He slowly turned his head, in a thick daze, and saw Dean standing several feet away, pale and out of breath.

“Yes, Mr. Winchester? Is there something you needed?” The man sounded bored and a little irritated, glaring at Dean through narrowed eyes.

“I, um, wanted to let you know that I placed the order for the extra brattice materials and replacement vent drills on your desk,” Dean said. His eyes flicked toward Castiel and back, a lightning-quick movement.

“You already told me that, earlier this afternoon,” the man said slowly, raising his eyebrows.

“Oh, well, I must have forgot,” Dean said, shrugging and smiling weakly. “Must be the rain or…whatever. Hey, Mr. Novak, everything okay? You get lost or something? School’s on the other side of town.” He sounded a little strained to Castiel’s ears, but he kept smiling as he asked. Cas couldn’t begin to return the smile; he felt broken on a fundamental level. He felt his lips tremble, and Dean must have caught the movement, because his jaw clenched and his whole demeanor seemed to go tense.

“Making new friends, Dean? How did you and…Mr. Novak”—he paused, appearing to commit the name to memory—”come to be acquainted with each other? Taking extra classes at night, perhaps?”

“My nephews go to that school,” Dean explained quickly, almost placating. “Guess I’ve had enough schooling, myself. I just keep up with things, that’s all. Anyway, if you get a chance to look at those order slips tonight, they can get them into the mail for first thing tomorrow, so that if we run out of what we already have in the next few days, we won’t have to hold up work waiting on the replacements.” He wiped his hands on his pants legs, which were damp enough to make the gesture pointless.

A loud whistle, mounted on top of the breaker, blew deafeningly, signaling the end of the work day. On the other side of the window, boys began jumping from their seats and climbing off their tipples; in the distance over Dean’s shoulders, Cas vaguely noted men pouring out of the mine, breaking into jogging steps down the road toward their houses as they felt the rain falling hard. The taller man scowled impatiently, waving his hand. “Yes, yes, I’ll see to it,” he growled. Turning, he looked at Castiel one last time, but apparently had lost interest in taunting a man so unresponsive. “Mr. Novak,” he said, nodding his head, then stalked off in the direction of the whitewashed operations building.

The moment the man was around the corner of the breaker building and out of sight, Dean strode toward Castiel, grabbing his forearms. “Jesus, Cas, what are you doing here? Do you have any idea…you’re freezing. God, Cas, look at you, you’re shaking so bad.” Cas couldn’t speak, just shivering and numbly staring. “Come on, we’ve got to get you warmed up.”

Following as he was gently pulled behind Dean, Castiel had no idea where he was being guided, and he had no strength or mental presence to ask. He moved clumsily, uncaring of the puddles that splashed up the legs of his pants. Dean hadn’t let go of his arm, and the warmth of his hand scorched his skin through the sodden fabric of the shirt. A sudden, violent tremor shook his body, and he nearly fell. Dean swore quietly, viciously, as he caught him under the arm with his other hand, supporting Cas’s weight even as he moved them more quickly to whatever destination he had in mind.

Dean kept murmuring the entire way, though little of it made sense through the haze in Cas’s brain. “Of all the places and all the people, Cas, you have no idea what I felt, seeing you there, and him with you. I never wanted…but I never said, so you didn’t know, and I’ve never been so scared in my life. Shit, you’re blue! And I don’t mean your eyes, though, damn, do they look bright right now, with your face white as a damn sheet…Need to get you somewhere safe, somewhere not out here. I should have said, should have told you not to… _damn it all_ , what were you thinking? No, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m just panicking, but it’s gonna be okay…” And on and on, as they finally reached a squat, windowless building on the far side of the mine.

“At least the rain means most of the men are gonna skip out on showers today,” Dean said, pushing open the door and pulling Cas through into a large empty room with pipes mounted along the walls. “No point in getting cleaned up just to get drenched right after. The rain’ll rinse off most of the coal dust, anyway. Here, sit.” He gently pushed Cas toward a small wooden bench against the wall, and Cas collapsed onto it, curling in on himself. Dean turned to a nearby shower knob and cranked it on; the water began to heat quickly, sending steam wafting into the air. Then he dropped to his knees in front of Cas and started yanking at the laces of his boots. Once he’d managed to drag the boots off his feet and peel away his socks, he reached for Cas’s belt buckle, and alarm shattered the near catatonic state in which Cas had been caught.

With great effort, Cas tried to push away his hands. His teeth were chattering too hard to form words, but he shook his head. Dean easily pushed back against Castiel’s attempts to stop him, fixing him with a look that said he meant business. “You’ll get hypothermic if we don’t get you out of these clothes, and I mean right now,” he argued, and Cas felt helpless, too weak to protest. In the space of moments, Dean had Cas stripped down to his shorts, shivering as he stood with hands tucked under his arms. He whimpered a little, closing his eyes, when Dean pulled at the tie string, and Dean sighed.

“It’s not like you can get any colder than you are,” he stated, and he yanked the string loose and shoved the boxers down. “There,” he said, his voice softer. “Now come here.” Hands, rough skinned and so very warm, gently gripped Cas’s arms again and pulled him toward the shower. The hot water that enveloped him felt like flaming needles striking his skin, and Castiel hissed loudly.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Shhhh,” Dean murmured, running his hands up and down Cas’s arms, rubbing with some force. “It hurts, but you’re gonna be okay. God, you scared me.” His voice cracked, ever so slightly. Summoning his courage, Castiel opened his eyes, dreading the sight of Dean’s face like this but needing to see it anyway. He’d sounded angry earlier—was he angry with Cas? Was he pitying him for how pathetic he looked right now? He wasn’t merely stripped of his clothes, but of every defense he’d been erecting for weeks, and the shudders still racking his body were only due in part to the chill.

Dean’s eyes were huge, trained on his face, and full of anxiety. The shower was pouring over him as well as Cas, and his hair was plastered to his head; water dripped from his nose and ears, but he didn’t try to wipe it away, continuing to chafe at Castiel’s goose-pimpled flesh. When Cas opened his eyes and met his stare, the breath audibly caught in Dean’s throat. “There you are,” he almost whispered, nonsensically.

“D-D-Dean,” Castiel stammered, struggling to speak through stiff facial muscles.

“Shhhh,” Dean said again, taking Cas’s hands and attempting to rub circulation back into them. “’S’okay, man. Let me just…let me just do this.” His eyes dropped, focusing on his hands holding Castiel’s, massaging them.

Slowly, with no idea how much time was passing, Cas felt the bone-deep cold begin to recede. Perhaps the sound of the rain falling heavily on the roof began to fade, or maybe he was simply being lulled by the soothing warmth and hushed words of comfort. His muscles unclenched under the constant stream of warm water, and the painful prickling sensations eased, leaving only a massive sense of exhaustion. “I’m sorry,” he eventually managed to croak. His throat was as raw as if he had spent the last few hours screaming.

“Nothing to apologize for,” Dean said firmly. He pushed Cas’s hair back from his forehead, fingers lingering slightly, though Cas was sure that Dean was now just being overly cautious as he checked for any cold-deadened spots. He felt much better now. “Just tell me, what the hell were you doing out there? Of all the days to come exploring…”

The memory of why he’d been standing there by the breaker window came rushing back, and Cas flinched. Dean caught the movement, and his eyes narrowed. “Dean, it’s…I’m so _sorry,_ Dean. I was so upset, and I don’t know what I thought I could do, but—”

“Castiel.” Dean was close, so close, and his hand fell on Cas’s shoulder. The feel of it resting on his bare skin, now warmed, was starkly different from how it had felt chafing his numbed limbs, and it stopped the rambling apology in its tracks. “Tell me what’s wrong,” Dean said sternly.

“It’s Jesse,” Cas whispered. “He…he just…” The explanation he couldn’t give wasn’t necessary. Dean immediately knew exactly what Cas was unable to say. All the air seemed to come whooshing out of his lungs in one gust as he closed his eyes and dropped his head.

“No,” he breathed. “Oh, that kid. That stupid kid. Why?” He shook his head, trying to deny it, but it was pointless.

Castiel reached for Dean’s hand once more, holding it close and feeling Dean tremble. It would have been an impossibly intimate gesture only yesterday, but in the face of their current situation, it seemed that all the rules were changing. Maybe tomorrow, things would be back to the way they were, but for now, he felt pulled to comfort Dean as much as he could. “Will you tell Sam?” he asked carefully. “Sam will stop this, won’t he?”

Dean’s head was still lowered, and he shook it again, groaning. “He’d try,” he said quietly. “He’d march right up to that breaker, or he’d go to Alastair—that’s the foreman, the bastard who was hovering over you out there—and he’d demand that they send Jesse home. They probably would, except…except Alastair, he has a way of turning those demands into favors. He’d offer Sammy a deal—keep Jesse safe, maybe even make it about money. Like, if they needed the extra money that Jesse could earn, he could find a way that Sam could earn a little more, some way that only he can offer. Or maybe he’d promise to keep both Jesse _and_ Jack out of the breaker house, but that favor will hang over Sam’s head forever, always there so Al can remind him, pull his strings, get him to do whatever he wants…and Sam would do it for his kids, I _know_ he would, because _I_ would, and…and…” Dean was breathing hard, and his pulse was jumping in his throat.

Castiel dropped his hand and reached for Dean’s face with both hands, holding it still. “Breathe, Dean,” he ordered. “Breathe like me. Look at my face.” Dean opened his eyes, and Cas felt as though he would drown in them. Nearly resting forehead to forehead, Cas inhaled deeply, watching carefully as Dean followed. Their chests rose and fell in tandem as he guided Dean back from the edge of panic. The warmth of their breaths lingered between their faces, so close now. The steam rose around them in billows; far from cold, now Cas was almost too warm. Dean’s cheeks were flushed, as well, and as Cas watched, his eyes dropped to Castiel’s lips. Without conscious thought, he moved closer. Dean’s breath hitched, and he licked his own lips.

And then they were kissing.

Maybe it was that he was still so, so worn from the tumultuous events of the day, but it took far too long for Castiel to consider the consequences of what was happening. He was lost in the heated slide of lips and tongues; the hands that had been cradling Dean’s face slipped around to the nape of his neck, fingers scraping along his scalp and tangling in the soft, light brown hair. Dean’s mouth opened around a groan, and it was only natural to take advantage of that, deepening the kiss until Cas was lightheaded with the need to breathe. His head spun; he was lost. He was—

Cas tore himself away from Dean, stumbling back against the wall in horror. _What have I done, what have I done?_ Dean looked so shocked, standing with his mouth hanging open. His lips were glistening wet— _from my tongue, God help me, I did that_ —and Cas knew that it was only because he’d pushed himself at Dean with so little warning that the shock of the situation had yet prevented the inevitable violent eruption.

“Oh, my God,” he said hoarsely. “Dean, I…” He saw Dean start to lift his hand, raising it toward him, and he flinched, trying to step back again but finding the wall blocking him. “Please, no, I’m sorry,” he babbled, then turned to try to flee. Unfortunately, his legs were still much more tired than he’d thought, and they wobbled under him. He hadn’t gone more than a handful of steps before Dean’s hand caught his arm.

“Cas, stop!” Dean begged. Castiel had expected angry shouting, and he was startled by the earnestness he heard instead. “Look, if you didn’t want that, then I’m the one who should be sorry, but don’t go running off. You’re not…you’re not even dressed,” he said, waving a hand up and down to indicate Cas’s nudity. “I’ll get you something to wear, and then if you really want to go…if you really regret what just happened, what we did…well, I won’t stop you.” He let go of Cas’s arm and stepped back, the determined set of his jaw at war with the devastation in his eyes. His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard.

“What we did…” Cas couldn’t make his mind stop whirling. “You don’t…I pushed myself at you. I should—”

“I seem to recall doing some pushing back,” Dean said carefully. “If you’re sorry we kissed, then I get it, and we can forget it ever happened, but if you’re apologizing because you think I regret it? That I didn’t want it? You have to know that’s not the case, man. Castiel, look at me.”

The sound of the shower water hitting the floor was inaudible behind the pounding of Castiel’s own pulse in his ears. They stood, facing each other and hardly daring to breathe, as Cas did as Dean asked. Nothing, not a twitch of an eyelid, showed anything but complete sincerity and clear-headed focus. Castiel ran through the memory of the kiss, searching for explanations. Dean’s groan—it hadn’t been shock or a noise of protest. The heat at his lower back had been the grip of hands, not the press of a wall. “You kissed me, too,” he said, stunned as his realization replaced fear.

“Yep,” Dean said, the corner of his lips trying to curl into a tentative smile. “That was definitely a two-way thing. Do you…wish we hadn’t?” The smile dipped.

Cas shook his head slowly from side to side. “Not even a little,” he said, rough voice close to breaking. His heart was beating even faster, and a stray thought flitted through his head that it would be just his luck to die of a coronary episode moments after finding his dream laid impossibly before him.

“Well, then,” Dean exhaled, “if you don’t regret it, and I know _I_ don’t, then…maybe we could try that again, without the excitement at the end?” He was smiling again, but there was still hesitance in his stance, as though Cas was a skittish animal that might bolt if he moved too quickly. Castiel didn’t like seeing Dean look nervous like that, lacking the swaggering confidence that he himself so rarely felt.

_He’s trusting me with so much,_ Cas thought. _If he can be that brave…I want to be brave, too._ “Please,” he said, stepping back toward Dean. The movement forward seemed to be all Dean needed, because he was closing the space between them, pulling Castiel in with one hand around his back and one sliding to the back of his neck. Even being able to anticipate what was coming, Cas barely had a chance to suck in a breath before their lips were meeting for a second time. It was much slower now, as both of them seemed determined to preserve every single sensation as cherished memory. The scent of rain and of the cheap soap of the mine bathhouse would be forever linked with feelings of passion and desire. The feel of work-calloused hands gliding over broad muscles and the inflaming roughness of Dean’s drenched work pants against the more vulnerable naked flesh now rubbing against them provided counterpoint to the kiss, driving it further, heightening the sensation, until they grew overwhelmed, panting at each other’s lips.

Cas noticed with a start that he was harder than he could recall ever being in his life. His hips were crushed against Dean’s, moving of their own accord in small thrusts, and he knew that if they weren’t both soaked, he’d probably be staining the fabric. He shuddered hard at the image, even as he tried to recover his composure.

“Dean, we need to stop,” he gasped. “Not here…not in public.” He forced himself to push his hands between their chests, pushing gently away. “It’s far too dangerous.”

Dean’s arousal was blatant, visible in the flush running down his neck and under his collar and in the dilated pupils that threatened to eclipse the green of his irises. His lips were swollen and red, and anyone who glimpsed him in that moment would know exactly what he had been doing. Castiel knew that he was in a similar state, though with far less ability to hide it. “Yeah,” Dean rasped, his voice deeper than his usual baritone. He blinked, fighting through his own daze. “Yeah, we should. But…” The thought of walking away from this moment and from each other was apparently as difficult to accept for him as it was for Castiel.

Cas leaned in, placed a soft kiss along Dean’s jaw; the accidental brush of their groins sent a bolt of pleasure up his spine, and he swallowed his groan with difficulty before speaking. “We need to talk about all this,” he insisted gently. “We’ll go back to my house, so we can talk and…whatever we decide. But just not here, okay?” He reached for Dean’s hand and squeezed it in reassurance.

“I know what I want,” Dean promised, squeezing back. His smile could have lit a moonless night. “Let’s go, then.”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scrip - the type of pay a miner received. Hey, ever hear the old song "Sixteen Tons"? That bit about owing one's soul to the company store is referring to this. Company pay was in company money (scrip), which could be spent at the company store, which was also "happy" to extend credit against a worker's future pay. Very quickly, a miner became an indentured servant of sorts, with no real recourse. That's another reason families might have been willing to sign their little boys over to the workforce so early.
> 
> Breaker - I think it's fairly clear here, but the breaker was the big building into which they dumped all the coal (into troughs called tipples) that the miners pulled from the ground. Sorting coal was the first job a lot of young boys had, and I do mean young. 
> 
> By the way, Nello is another family name, this time from my husband's equally Appalachian family tree.


	5. Chapter 5

Having Cas put his soaked clothing back on was obviously not going to happen. Dean found a spare set of old work coveralls hanging in a maintenance closet; they were filthy and too large, but at least they were dry. He quickly changed into the spare shirt and trousers he’d meant to wear after his own shower, and they headed out into the quiet evening.

Thankfully, the rain had abated; a light mist hung in the air and the temperature had already begun to climb again, but the storm had left behind a light breeze that was keeping things cooler. Dean still felt a little worried about the chill Cas had taken. He knew a good part of Cas’s violent shivering had stemmed from the emotional shocks of the day. Dean hadn’t asked what Alastair had been muttering into his ear before they’d noticed him approaching, and he was nervous about what it might have been; he recognized the sneer he’d seen on Alastair’s face from personal experience, and he knew that it rarely meant anything good. Even accounting for that, though, there was always a chance that although Dean had gotten him warmed up as quickly as he could, Cas could still catch a fever or cough as a result of being drenched and frozen. But those were just normal worries, nothing like the fear that he’d felt upon seeing Cas pale, shivering, and unable to speak.

“Gonna get you home and bundled up. I hope you didn’t already store all your winter blankets,” he said. “I know it’s summer, and hot as hell most days, but we need to make sure you’re all the way okay, right? Get you home, sitting down, and I’ll make you some of that nasty tea you love, and maybe I’ll toss a brick in your stove so you’ll have something to keep your feet warm.” Dean was babbling, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. With everything that had happened that evening, he was completely unable to settle his nerves, and the blush and grin had still not left his face.

Meanwhile, Castiel’s feet seemed to be dragging. At first, it made Dean even more concerned for his physical well-being. When he caught a glimpse of his shadowed expression, though, he realized that Cas was lost in thought. His brow was furrowed, and he was chewing at his lip, eyes downcast. It sent a quiver of uneasiness though Dean. Was Cas regretting everything after all? Now that his head was clearer, was he going to tell Dean it was a mistake?

They reached the darkened house, and Dean moved quickly to light an oil lamp and put the kettle on to heat some water. Cas headed for the trunk he’d stowed in the old sleeping loft, which held the flannel pajamas he hadn’t thought to need until the seasons turned again. He quickly climbed into them and pulled a house robe on top, and even though it hadn’t been an hour since he’d seen Cas completely naked, Dean respectfully kept from ogling him as he changed. By the time Cas finished, the water was boiling, and Dean pulled one of the delicate cups and saucers from the cabinet, along with a plain white teapot.

“My mother’s,” Castiel murmured fondly, looking at it. “She would probably have given the set to my sister, Anna, but Anna married up, and her husband’s family gifted her with a much finer tea set. My brothers aren’t fond of tea, so.” He headed for the tea canister, but Dean waved him away toward the table.

“No, you get your ass in a chair,” he ordered. “I may not drink it, but I know how to make it.” When Cas raised an eyebrow skeptically, Dean huffed. “Sam had trouble sleeping sometimes when he was a kid, and my mom gave him tea with milk. It was just plain old tea from the cheapest jar at the store, nothing like your fancy flower leaves and shit, but it’s the same idea.” He scooped some tea leaves into the pot, then poured the water over them. Flourishing in mock triumph, he winked as he sat down across from Cas, who chuckled quietly.

A hesitant quiet fell between them. Castiel had been the one who’d said they needed to talk, and while that was certainly true, Dean had no idea where to even start putting any of how he felt into words. And there was that worried look he’d seen on the way here, too. As the silence stretched, so did Dean’s nerves, and he started to toy with his shirt cuffs.

“Dean, have you ever been with another man?” The abrupt breaking of the stillness made Dean jump a little, embarrassingly. Cas went on, clarifying. “Like tonight, I mean. Romantically. Sexually.”

Dean gulped, trying not to react to the mere mention of sex, delivered in that controlled, serious tone that never failed to stir something deep in his gut. “Thought about it,” he said truthfully. “I’ve imagined it, once or twice. Never felt quite brave enough to gamble on saying anything or doing anything about it. Not until now.” His cheeks burned with the confession, but he wouldn’t take it back. “How about you?” he said, though he was sure he already knew.

Castiel didn’t immediately answer, reaching for the teapot and straining the tea into his cup. He didn’t sweeten it, though Dean knew from previous conversations that he missed the ready access to honey that he’d had in the cafeteria at normal school. “Only once,” he said. Dean must have looked surprised, because Cas huffed a short laugh. “Did you think I was some sort of siren, seducing the innocent young men of Pennsylvania with my wicked wiles?” He batted his eyelashes coyly.

“Well, no, but…” Dean shrugged sheepishly. “I don’t know, it just seemed like you knew what you were doing.”

“Rarely,” Cas said dryly. “And especially not in this area. There was a reason it was just the one relationship. When I left home and moved into the dormitories at school, part of me was perhaps too eager to take advantage of all the privacy I’d never had. And perhaps communal sleeping rooms crammed with handfuls of strangers doesn’t sound like the definition of private, but it was better than living under my family’s eyes. And…there were some like-minded students. Not many,” he hastened to add. “Or at least, not many who were open about it. But…some. And Vernon was…charming.”

Dean bit his lip, keeping himself from speaking when he saw sadness sweep across Castiel’s face. He already hated this Vernon, even if he knew nothing more than the man’s name.

“In retrospect, I was probably more taken with the idea of a chance at finding love than I ever was with him in particular,” Cas went on. “I let myself be swept off my feet. Vernon was president of our literary society, and he was quite passionate in his views about almost everything. When he focused his attentions on me, I was flattered. It felt like more than it actually turned out to be.”

“He hurt you,” Dean surmised.

“Mostly because I didn’t see it coming, like a blind fool,” Castiel said, frowning. “He seemed like such a romantic to me, spouting lines from love poetry and waxing on about the beauty of our entwined spirits…” This time, Dean might have been the one to snort, had it not been for the self-disgust obvious in Cas’s voice. “He was a few years older than I was, and he was in his final year of school. One afternoon, he pulled me into an empty lecture hall and told me it was over, that we were done. According to him, love wasn’t even real; it was just a fantasy invented by the weak-minded and the unenlightened. He needed to move on and start preparing himself for an appropriate match, finding a wife ‘suitable for his station.’ As though he was ever more than the youngest son of a store clerk and a piano teacher.”

Indignant anger boiled in Dean. “Son of a bitch,” he growled.

“Well, as to that, I have no knowledge or much room to judge. He was entirely far enough removed from his childhood to have diminished any culpability his mother might have had for his bad behavior, though.”

It took a moment for Dean to realize Cas was teasing him by deliberately misinterpreting, and the deadpan humor was unexpected enough that he laughed loudly. The pleased smile on Cas’s face seemed to indicate that it had been his intention. The mood was lighter after that, and Dean leaned back in his chair and stretched comfortably.

“I may not have as much experience as you imagined, Dean, but I do have a better idea about the risks and dangers involved,” Cas went on. “Tell me, in your memory, have there ever been any men around town or the area who have been caught having relations with another man, or women with other women?”

“Nothing that was ever really public knowledge, but there were some whispers about one of the old stablemen, worked with the mules,” Dean recalled. “I don’t know if any of it had any truth, but somebody said he was like that, and people whispered.”

“And what happened to him?”

Dean thought. “Well, he was pretty much a hermit, anyway. Spent more time with the animals than people. Some of the uglier rumors actually had to do with that, which was just ridiculous, not to mention disgusting.”

“But not unexpected,” Cas said pointedly. “And even that’s really not so bad, except for how it infects the mind of everyone around the target, so they can’t help but think of those stories whenever they see him. Violence is a possibility. Even murder might be all but ignored if the authorities choose to follow their groundless hatred over the law. After all, buggery is illegal as well.”

Dean’s mouth twisted in frustration. “It’s horse shit,” he said. “When I told you most folks around here follow the Golden Rule, treating others like they want to be treated, I meant it.”

“But this isn’t like when a neighbor worships in a different way or not at all, or even when he drinks too much and becomes a public spectacle,” Cas said fiercely. “You need to understand this, Dean. I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes. This is the sort of thing that can ruin a man.” He set down his cup a little more sharply than he might have, causing tea to slop onto the table. Without reaching for a rag to wipe it up, he ran a hand through his hair, exhaling heavily. “I suppose I’ve never known such a thing as real privacy. For a long time, I dreamed so much of becoming a writer, and a good part of that fantasy was rooted in the idea of building a quiet life for myself, perhaps in a secluded, quiet cottage by the ocean. I visited the shore once, as a child, and the image stayed with me—the idea of being far from judgment, from all the watching, weighing eyes.”

“I’d come with you,” Dean said softly. Castiel didn’t respond, staring into the distance. Cautiously, Dean reached for his free hand, where it rested on the table, and Cas didn’t pull away. “You’re so scared, Cas, and I get it. I do. Honestly, there’s a ton of stuff in this world that scares the hell out of me. When I saw Alastair talking to you today, for starters. You know, that was the guy I was talking about when I was so upset that one time, the one who thinks he owns me, and maybe he does. When I saw him leaning over you, part of me was so scared I’d somehow put you in danger that I was sure, right then, that the wisest and most caring thing I could do would be to push you away from me and to stay away, just to protect you.” Castiel’s eyes narrowed and his brows lowered, but before he could argue, Dean lifted a hand to stop him. “I probably should still do that, and I might have tried, if I were a better man. But I guess I’m not.”

“You’re one of the best men,” Cas murmured. “And I’d never have let you get away with that ridiculousness, not for him.”

Dean chuckled. “Yeah, all right,” he said affectionately. “But anyway, what I mean to say is this: I might be afraid of some stuff, but for some reason, this—this thing between us, being with you in any way, in _every_ way? Getting a chance to hold you and to love you?” He nearly stammered over the word “love,” but seeing Cas’s eyes blow wide when he said it openly made him glad he’d tried. “This doesn’t scare me at all.”

[](http://de.tinypic.com/?ref=21j7k37)

Tears shimmered, threatened to spill down Castiel’s cheeks. He cleared his throat a couple of times before he spoke. “I hope I can be worthy of your confidence,” he said, turning over their clinging hands and adding his other palm to grip Dean’s between his. His thumb stroked the back of Dean’s hand, which made Dean shiver pleasurably.

“Um,” he added, wishing he still had a little of that eloquence left, but he’d apparently blown through it all in one shot. “Just…could we go a little slow, maybe? I mean, I’ve got a pretty good imagination about how this all, you know, works…” Dean gestured between them with a vague wave. “But that’s about all I have.” His cheeks were hot, and he was surprised Cas wasn’t laughing at him.

Lifting his hand, Cas pressed it to his lips, kissing it softly. “I promise you, I’m not about to pressure you into anything you don’t want or don’t feel ready to do. All that we did tonight was wonderful, and it was certainly more than I expected.”

“Well, sure. How do you predict being dragged off and stripped naked before we even kissed?” _Back to awkward babbling,_ he cringed. Castiel just grinned, eyes crinkling at the corners, and Dean desperately wanted to kiss him again. He felt incredibly self-conscious about making the next move, though, after laying it all out on the line as he had. Apparently, Cas was having similar thoughts; he leaned forward across the table, ducking his head slightly in invitation. It took a couple of aborted movements, which made them both giggle, and then they were both leaning on their elbows, meeting each other’s mouths over the forgotten teapot and cup.

As intense as much of the day had been, it was unsurprising that it would eventually catch up to him. Lifting a hand to cup Castiel’s jaw and parting his own lips in an attempt to push the tender kiss into something deeper, Dean found his jaw opening even further without his permission, cracking around a massive yawn. Cas pulled away, laugh lines crinkling as he smiled softly. “I know better than to take that personally,” he said, which made Dean feel a little less mortified. “You should have been in bed by now, I think. Now I’ll worry about you making it home without dropping off to sleep in a hawthorn bush.”

“I could stay here,” Dean suggested, the words escaping before he thought about them or how they might sound. “I mean…just to sleep. I am pretty beat, and I also sort of…don’t want to leave.” He bit his lip, nervous. _I sound like such an idiot,_ he thought, berating himself.

“This is part of what I’m talking about,” Castiel said, a small frown forming. “Anyone could see you leaving my house in the morning, and that’s the sort of thing that starts gossip. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

Dean stroked his thumb over Cas’s cheekbone soothingly. “That’s an upside to the freakishly early hours of my work shift,” he said. “I head out long before anybody else does, when it’s still pitch-black. Nobody will even be awake to see me, not even the roosters. But if you want me to go—”

“I don’t,” Cas cut in, voice much more confident. “I think…I’d like nothing more than to have you in my arms for the rest of the night.”

Giddy, Dean felt like teasing a little. “Just tonight?”

“Let’s start with that,” Castiel teased right back.

Neither man had enough energy left for the removal of their outer clothing to be more than the careless work of a few moments. Dean had no pajamas with him, of course, and crawling into Castiel’s bed in only his underwear had his pulse pounding a little harder than was warranted. Cas slipped in behind him, draping an arm around Dean’s waist and practically nuzzling his face between his shoulder blades. The feel of the stubble against his skin, along with the novelty of having a large, strong, undeniably masculine body wrapped around him in bed, made his head spin for a moment. Everything about this was different from all that he knew or had experienced in his brief experiences with women, and yet it felt comfortable, like something he’d never known he was missing until that very moment. He felt protected, precious, and though he’d never, ever be able to admit it out loud, he relished that feeling deeply.

Drifting in the sleepy haze as his thoughts and heartbeat slowed, he lifted Castiel’s hand, marveling at the subtle differences between it and his own. His own nails, permanently lined and stained black with coal dust no matter how hard he scrubbed, contrasted sharply with the clean and well-tended cuticles of a teacher, but it wasn’t the same way that a female hand would appear delicate and fine in his grasp. Cas’s fingers were long and attractive, capable and strong. Dean laced their fingers together, admiring how well they fit together for that purpose, and he raised their hands to his lips and placed a kiss along their meshed knuckles before returning the hands to his sternum. They were still joined when he fell asleep at last.

\---

Dean’s body had been conditioned over the years to wake him, almost without fail and without any sort of alarm needed, just before four-thirty every morning. That gave him about half an hour to get dressed and walk to the mine, usually eating his breakfast along the way. It was a simple routine, and it was embedded in his bones through repetition.

Today was different, and his body realized that before his mind was aware enough to process way. Dean woke early, fully alert, his eyes flying open in the darkness. He was immediately aware, with incredible acuity, of how he and Castiel had shifted and rolled during the night, moving restlessly as the warmth of their bodies had heated the air around them and under the sheets. Now he found himself pressed against Cas’s side, head pillowed on his shoulder, erection swollen and hard against Cas’s hip. When he’d woken, it had been to find himself thrusting lightly against the firm muscle, apparently caught in a pleasant dream whose details had drained swiftly from his mind in the moment he realized what he was doing.

Dean tensed, uncertain of how to extricate himself and his pride from the embarrassing situation without waking his bed partner. His cock throbbed almost painfully as he tried not to shift, making it clear that, at the very least, he was going to have to find some way to deal with that before he considered being able to walk to work.

The anxious involuntary tightening of his muscles, however, must have stirred Cas to wakefulness. “What’s going… _oh._ ” To Dean’s burning chagrin, there was no way to hide what was happening with his body, and Cas was far from oblivious. Shifting his own weight as he rolled slightly to bring them face-to-face, Cas brushed his hip against Dean’s groin, almost pulling a whimper from Dean when he did.

“I swear, I wasn’t…I mean, I wasn’t trying to…you were asleep, and I’d never—”

“Dean, stop.” Cas didn’t sound upset at all, either about being woken too early or being, _Jesus_ , practically molested in his sleep. In fact, he sounded amused. When he put a hand under Dean’s chin and lifted it, looking straight into his eyes, there was a stirring of something heated in his gaze. “You don’t need to be ashamed. One of the advantages of being with a man is that you don’t have to explain about things like being hard in the morning.” The frank delivery of those coarse words slammed into Dean’s arousal like a freight train, and he felt his dick twitch and grow even harder. “The only question to be decided is whether you’d prefer privacy…or assistance.”

Dean couldn’t have resisted even if he’d ever had much intention of trying.

He did feel a little hesitant about actually voicing his answer out loud, so rather than attempt to speak, he dove in for a kiss, pushing his body against Castiel’s. Cas responded enthusiastically, grabbing at Dean’s bottom and dragging him even closer, demonstrating as he did that Dean wasn’t the only one who’d woken up ready to continue their activities from the previous evening. Having another man’s cock rutting against his own for the first time in his life, Dean was stunned at how absolutely _not_ weird he felt, as well as how quickly it was all going to be done and over if they continued along as they were. On one hand, his swiftly approaching climax promised to be one for the ages, based on the wild heat building in his gut; their kisses had begun to devolve into sloppy, open-mouthed panting, and his underwear was growing uncomfortably damp with sweat and the slickness leaking from his cock. On the other hand, the pace of it all was starting to feel overwhelming, and Dean wasn’t sure he wanted this to end so soon, anyway.

“Cas, please,” he gasped, struggling for words. When they refused to come, he resorted to shoving a hand between their waists, pushing at the waistband of Castiel’s pajamas. Cas groaned, apparently able to interpret his unspoken wish and finding complete agreement with it.

“Shhh, Dean,” he murmured, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.” His current level of coordination far outstripped Dean’s, clearly, as he was able to undo the buttons at Dean’s fly as well as his own tie string, pushing both articles of clothing down below their hips hurriedly. If Dean had felt overheated before that, it was nothing compared to the sensation of flushed, hard flesh against flesh. A noise burst from his throat that sounded as though his lungs were tearing loose, and he dropped his head against Cas’s shoulder with a thud, running his hands up Cas’s chest and balling them tightly in the fabric of his shirt.

With no further hesitation, Castiel wrapped a hot, damp palm around both of their lengths ( _no, definitely not like the tiny hand of a woman, not at all_ ) and stroked them together. “So hot…Dean…God…” he hissed, as the friction between them lessened, his hand slipping faster over their throbbing cocks. Reaching the edge of his orgasm, Dean raised his chin to bury his face in Cas’s neck, immersing himself in the scents of sweat, sex, and Castiel.

He cried out softly as he came, pulsing and covering Cas’s hand with his release. Cas never stopped stroking, spreading the fluid messily over them both, and a moment later, he was groaning through his own climax, the sound of Dean’s name catching in his throat. They clung to each other, chests heaving; Dean felt as though he was floating apart from his body in waves of contentment. When he finally caught his breath enough to form speech, he grinned goofily at Cas’s still stunned expression. “That might be better than coffee, for getting me going in the morning.”

“Don’t know about that,” Cas replied hoarsely, blinking away his haze. “You’re still in bed, not moving.”

“Hey, we were moving pretty well a moment ago!” Dean joked. Beaming, he threw back the sheets, making a face at the mess on his stomach. “I’ll grab a rag,” he said, bouncing himself over Cas’s legs and off of the mattress before moving across the house with a swagger.

“Oh, God, you’re one of those people who get _more_ energetic after sex, aren’t you,” Castiel grumbled, but he was smiling, too. “Don’t tell me you’re a morning person, or this is never going to work between us.”

“Sort of a job requirement. Gotta be perky when I’m checking for all the things that could kill people, you know?” Dean smirked as he returned with a damp cloth. Cas took the rag and wiped his own hand and stomach, looking back at Dean with narrowed eyes.

“I suppose that’s true, though I’m sure the canaries’ moods are less relevant to their efficiency.” He sat up, stretching his arms over his head before grabbing the bottom of his soiled shirt and hauling it over his head without bothering to unbutton more than the top two buttons.

“No more birds down there,” Dean said cheerfully. God, he felt amazing. Cas was amazing. The whole damn _world_ was amazing. “Just me and my little lamp, hanging out in the dark, trying not to breathe too deep until I know it’s okay.”

“Dean,” Castiel said, his brow furrowed in consternation, “maybe you should stop telling me about your job, or else I might end up just keeping you here for your own protection." And if Dean had to think for a minute to decide whether that was really such a bad plan, he’d have challenged anyone else to do otherwise.

It was now a little past the time when he needed to leave for work, so he scrambled to get dressed and ready. His work clothes from yesterday were dry, though still pretty filthy from the day’s work, even after their time in the showers. He straightened the wrinkles out as best he could, using a hand broom in an attempt to remove the worst of the stains. While he did that, Cas started some coffee percolating on his stove, and then busied himself around the cupboards, pulling out bread, cheese, and some jarred pickles. Dean looked up from his efforts in time to see Cas wrapping an impressive-looking sandwich in waxed paper and nestling it in Dean’s lunch pail.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Dean protested, trying not to be distracted by the equally impressive sight of fully naked Castiel preparing food for him.

“I did,” Cas argued. “You won’t have time to go to your own house and make lunch before work, and I don’t want you to go hungry today due to having been my guest last night.” Pouring some of the fresh coffee into a thermos before twisting the lid securely onto the top, he then leveled a finger at Dean in playful severity. “Your full stomach might mean the difference between safety and peril for hundreds of men, and I won’t have that on _my_ head.”

If Dean had been blissfully happy before, now he was practically melting. He’d never, ever had someone pack him a lunch to carry to work. Even when Mom was around, he’d been big enough to be in charge of his own lunch pail. The part of him that had envied Sam the lunches Sarah had packed was crowing with joy.

Without hesitating, he crossed the floor in a few steps and grabbed Cas about the waist, pulling him in for a passionate kiss that seriously jeopardized his being on time for work. Then, dazzled by the shine of Castiel’s sparkling blue eyes, he murmured his goodbye and headed out into the pre-dawn blackness toward the mine.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literary society - type of a club at normal schools and colleges of the period. They'd read and debate, and they had their own libraries.


	6. Chapter 6

It wasn’t until Sam was nodding his sleepy morning greeting a few hours later that Dean suddenly remembered his near breakdown over Jesse the day before. He had been so thoroughly distracted by everything that came afterward that he’d neglected to think about what he would do or say to Sam about it. From the look of passive contentment on his brother’s face, it was clear that Jesse had somehow managed to get away with keeping his new job hidden; Sam had never had much of a poker face, and there was no way he’d be anything but either distraught or pissed off if he knew about it.

Dean had to hand it to the kid. He had no idea how Jesse hadn’t gotten caught red—well, black—handed. Unfortunately, his nephew’s success now put Dean in a bit of a dilemma. Instead of consoling or cautioning Sam about the whole mess, now he had to either pretend he didn’t know anything, or else rat the boy out, shattering Sam’s heart. Looking at Sam’s face as he clowned around with a few of the other mine workers, he decided he couldn’t tell him. Not today, not right now. He’d do it if he had to, but maybe if he waited, he wouldn’t have to. Either Jesse would get found out, or maybe Dean could talk to the kid himself, or to some third party, and they could find a way to fix this before Sam even had to know. It was a slim chance, but he’d take it.

Dean fought back yet another yawn. He hadn’t gotten as much sleep as he liked the night before, though the idea of regretting any moment of his wakefulness was past absurd. His eyelids might be dragging, but his heart had never felt so alive, and he’d practically floated the entire way to the mine, drowsily remembering the heat of Cas’s hands and the feel of Casl’s lips caressing his own. Holding his coffee thermos upside down over his mouth to let the last few drops spill onto his tongue, he heard heavy footsteps approaching and felt the thud of a bag on the ground by his feet.

“Skipping out on laundry day, chief?” Benny said, smirking and pointedly assessing Dean’s grubby work clothes out of the corner of his eye. “Or was it just doubly disgusting in the tunnels this morning? Maid take the day off?”

Joking and teasing were nothing out of the ordinary with his team, and Dean should have been able to shoot back with a barb of his own, no problem. It was likely that Benny wasn’t even thinking too much about the dirty clothes, other than how they gave him an easy opening to poke at Dean and get the ball rolling for a morning of playful banter to offset the seriousness of their jobs. Today, though, the combination of Dean’s tired brain, Cas’s words of caution, and the edginess he was already feeling from his concern about Jesse meant that Dean found himself short-circuiting, panicking as he struggled for a suitable excuse. Before he could do more than open and close his mouth a time or two, however, Victor was elbowing Benny in the side.

“Must be nice to have a girl at home to wash all your dainties for you, brother,” Victor said sarcastically, winking at Dean as he did. “You and Garth get to live the high life, with shirts that you can actually fold, and probably fucking rose-scented hankies in your underwear drawers. Dean and me ain’t married, so we don’t get to be lazy sons of bitches like you two.” Benny aimed a punch at Victor’s ribs, but Victor laughed and ducked away.

“Who’s lazy?” Garth said, coming into the conversation a little late. Dean shook his head with a chuckle, and Garth shrugged, reaching for Dean’s slate to get a look at what was on tap for the morning.

Relieved at the unexpected rescue, Dean made a lame excuse about needing to do a little more examination of one of the outer tunnels that wouldn’t see any work teams until a little later that day, sending the crew down into another area to shore up some line bratticing they’d already installed that was starting to pull from its anchoring. The quiet privacy gave him a chance to regroup and sort his thoughts a little, so that he could hopefully avoid being caught off-guard again. The inspection wasn’t a complete charade, though; when he’d looked at it during his initial walk-through, Dean had been on the fence about a few of the chambers, and he wanted the opportunity to check them out a little more.

He cursed under his breath as the flame in his lamp, just as it had before, flickered and guttered slightly when he hung it from the roof. It was, perversely, almost exactly the situation Alastair had described the other day, and damned if he wasn’t stuck in just that dilemma. If the flame had died, there would be absolutely no question about closing off this area until his guys could punch a few ventilation holes to clear out the methane. With it just flickering, it was a judgment call, and he knew he was going to catch hell if he delayed work based on a gut feeling instead of clear-cut evidence. Maybe he’d just get a verbal skinning, or maybe there would be threats against his family. Dean watched the flame dance, thinking. The flickering had stopped, and now the fire was simply waving softly, gentle glow making shadows dance along the rough walls. He bit his lip. It would probably be okay for now, he decided, making a mental note to check again the next day and resigning himself to the uneasy feeling in his gut.

The work day crawled by, with eons stretching between the whistle that started the shift and the echoing shouts that heralded the lunch break. Dean sat in the shade of the breaker building, back against the wall, and unpacked his sandwich. Hastily made as it was, Dean decided it was the best sandwich he’d ever tasted. Hunger and fondness for the maker weren’t the only reasons for that, either; had Cas made these pickles himself? There was a slight sweetness to them, and he wondered what had gone into the brine to cause that. His mom’s pickles had been good, but they were tart enough to turn your mouth inside out.

In the open area past the operations building, Dean could see the herd of breaker boys, all on break as well, racing around and pelting each other with rocks and small bits of metal they found on the ground. Cringing, he recalled doing the same thing when he was that age; he still had the tiny scars as proof. A flash of brown and red showed in the middle of a knot of the boys, and Dean squinted, looking for verification that the jacket he’d seen was his nephew’s. _How the hell am I going to protect him, too?_ He drew idle squiggles in the dirt by his feet, not looking down at them. _And why the hell should I have to? Why is he doing this?_

All at once, he was filled with fury. He jumped to his feet and strode directly toward the fray. Some of the more brazen kids made rude noises at him when he stalked between them and interrupted the game, but he didn’t slow until he was standing face to face with Jesse. The boy hadn’t seen him coming until it was too late to escape, and now he looked, wide-eyed and pale, like he was seeing his own grisly death.

“A word,” Dean snapped, jerking a thumb in the direction from which he’d come. Turning on his heel, he didn’t bother looking over his shoulder to make sure Jesse was following. Once they were apart from the group, he turned back toward Jesse and glared. “So, how ‘bout you tell me exactly what you think you’re doing?” he said, surprised at the steadiness of his own voice.

“Got a job,” Jesse muttered, staring at the ground.

“Hey, eyes on mine,” Dean said sharply. When Jesse looked up sullenly, Dean nodded and went on. “I can see you got a job. What I want to know is _why._ I know your daddy brings home enough pay to feed you kids, and you’re not hurting for much of anything else. No reason at all why you shouldn’t be in school, at least until you’re _legally_ old enough to be here.” He didn’t miss the way Jesse flinched at the emphasized word.

“It’s for Jack,” Jesse said, eyes pleading. He’d managed to inherit Sam’s uncanny ability to mimic the endearing, mournfully shimmering gaze of a sad puppy whenever he desperately wanted something, and Dean had to grit his teeth to avoid falling under the spell. “Jack’s been talking about how he wants to finish school, all the way through, and then go to college, like Mr. Novak. Only he says he wants to go to a doctor college, not a teacher college, and it costs a whole lot of money. Mama puts away some money every month for emergencies, but…” He scowled, scuffing his toe in the dirt.

“But it’s not enough for college,” Dean finished for him, trying not to react.

“Jack is a genius! He could be the best doctor in the whole world!” Jesse said with the passion of hero-worshiping younger brother. “And then…my friend Georgie, whose dad was a brakeman? He had an, um, accident last week. A bad one.”

Dean knew. Joe Torrico was a good man who worked hard, but he wouldn’t be working the switches again, not after getting snagged on and dragged by a heavily-loaded coal car. He was lucky to have lost no more than a hand. His family would be struggling to find another way to survive, and Dean knew Jesse had already made the simple logical leap of wondering what would happen to his own family if something happened to his father.

“Brakemen do dangerous work,” he reassured as best he could. “Your dad doesn’t even go down in the mine very often.”

“Yeah, but he’s still working with big machines,” Jesse grumbled. “You can’t say nothing will happen, because you don’t know.”

Dean wanted to argue, but he couldn’t. “No, you don’t,” he said.

“And anyway,” Jesse pushed on quickly, before Dean could add that accidents could happen in the breaker, too, “I figured if I start working now, then by the time Jack’s ready to go off to college, I can probably work my way up to mule driver! Georgie’s cousin Pete got his mule when he was fourteen, and he’s pure stupid. If he could do it, I guess I could have a full team by the time I’m sixteen. I’m pretty good with animals, and I learn fast.”

Jesse’s face had lit up with enthusiasm as he talked about his plan, and Dean felt like a complete hypocrite. He’d done the same thing for nearly the same reasons, and he’d been younger than Jesse. He hadn’t done half this amount of thinking before he took the jump, either. His conflicted thoughts must have shown on his face, because Jesse smiled more broadly as he kept chattering, obviously sensing victory.

“I know I can do it, Uncle Dean. Even the breaker boss says I’m doing a good job, and I just started! He said that if I keep it up, he might be willing to put in a word for me with the stable boss when I’m a little older.” Jesse glowed with pride as he boasted, but Dean almost flinched. The breaker boss wasn’t Alastair, he knew; Dean had nothing against the man, and he’d never heard anybody say a word about his character. Even so, red flags flew and alarms sounded in Dean’s brain.

“That might sound good, Jesse, and I know it felt good to hear it, but I want you to listen to me. If you’re gonna do this, then do it smart. Don’t let yourself wind up owing favors to the bosses, you hear?” At Jesse’s puzzled look, Dean sighed and ran a hand over his own face. “You’re right, you are smart, and you don’t need any leg-ups. Just…just trust me, okay? It’s better to make it as your own man than as anybody else’s.”

Whether he was still confused or not, Jesse’s chest puffed visibly at being called a man. Dean knew he’d made the decision, consciously or not, to do whatever he had to do to support the kid. It might not be what he or Sam had ever wanted, but sometimes a man had to work the seam he was given, not the one he wished he’d had. On the other hand, there was still the matter of keeping secrets to be addressed.

Clearing his throat and leveling a pointed look at his nephew, he said, “If you really want to be a man, though, you need to be an honest one. Why don’t you tell me how you and, I assume, Georgie are here working? I know your Dad doesn’t know, and you’re not old enough to get on here without his say-so.”

“Georgie’s dad got an extra form from the courthouse,” Jesse confessed, blushing a little with guilt. He wasn’t nearly so nervous about spilling the truth anymore. “He actually got a bunch, since he can’t write so good, and he figured he’d make some mistakes. He wrote on the form that Georgie was fourteen in March, and Georgie swiped the extra form for us to copy. The man in the office didn’t even look at it.”

Dean shook his head and made a disapproving noise. It was a pretty smart strategy, but he wasn’t going to say that. “Well, show’s over now. I’ll give you a few days to tell your dad, and if you don’t do it, I will. Believe me, it’ll be better coming from you than if he finds out from me. And you want to do it before you wind up with a black eye from one of those rocks you boys are throwing, or before your fingers start cracking and bleeding from being jammed in the chutes. Here, let me see.” He grabbed Jesse’s hand, wincing over how the skin was already as chapped and red as if he had been playing outside in the dead of winter with no gloves.

“Hurts,” Jesse hissed quietly, flexing his fingers. “It’s okay, though.”

“I know it hurts, son. I worked the breaker once, too. Come by my cabin tonight, and I’ll give you some goose grease. That’ll help until your skin hardens up.” They looked at each other in understanding—sometimes you just have to tolerate the pain to do what needs to be done.

\---

The tumult of footfalls thundering down the wooden steps out of the school shook the building, and Castiel let his head fall back on his shoulders with a groan. The lack of sleep the previous night had worn on him all day; even wrapped in warm contentment with Dean in his arms, he’d found himself unable to close his eyes, enthralled as he’d been by the details afforded to his eyes by their new closeness. He’d been fascinated by the tiny star-shaped scar just below the hairs at Dean’s nape, as well as by the perfect seashell curl of his upper ear. Cas could hardly believe he’d been allowed the chance to have this, even if it turned out to be for that one night, and he couldn’t bring himself to miss a moment of it. When he’d blinked awake that morning, it was to the feeling that he’d only just closed his eyes a moment before.

He’d been in a giddy mood all morning after Dean had gone, filled with a strange sense of satisfaction over the thought of the sandwich that _he’d_ made being in Dean’s hands that afternoon. Perhaps that was a bit possessive? It didn’t matter; it wasn’t as though anyone but he and Dean would know who’d packed the lunch, so he let himself enjoy the novel feeling. He’d never really had the opportunity to act possessively toward anyone before.

It was a Friday, which had come to mean supper at Sam’s house. Castiel tapped a fingernail on his desk, contemplating. He enjoyed those large family meals, especially with Sarah’s excellent culinary talents, but there were now other considerations to be taken into account. The empty seat next to Jack today reminded Cas of Jesse’s situation. Had Sam learned that his son was no longer in school, that he was working at the mine? If he hadn’t found out, would Cas be expected to act as though nothing had changed, or would he need to say something?

And then there were the new developments in his relationship with Dean. Though he didn’t regret any of their decisions in the slightest, Cas knew that Sam and Dean were very close, even for brothers, and that Sam would be quite likely to pick up on any subtle differences in Dean’s body language or behaviors. Hiding their feelings in front of Sam would be extremely difficult, Castiel thought with a grimace. He still wasn’t convinced, either, that Dean really understood the damage that could be done by the discovery of a man’s homosexual activity. Subtle aggressions based on suspicion weren’t even close to what might happen if people had proof, and Castiel simply didn’t know Sam well enough to know whether he could be trusted.

His stomach churned unpleasantly as he recalled the terrible circumstances that scandalized his classes in his last year at school. Poor Daniel; Castiel hadn’t known him all that well, but over the few conversations he’d had with him, they’d established a cordial acquaintance, one that was founded mostly on their shared distaste for the school’s physical education requirements. It had shocked everyone, Castiel included, when Daniel had been caught in an “intimate embrace”—the specific details of which had been “too appalling” to divulge, and which were therefore subject to the most licentious of imaginative conjectures by smirking, “horrified” classmates—with a new young groundskeeper. The groundskeeper had been summarily dismissed, of course, and Daniel…the last time Castiel saw him, he was walking away from the school, bags slung on his shoulder as he stumbled in a bewildered daze. Daniel hadn’t had money for a coach to go anywhere, and as the school hadn’t skimped on the reasons behind his expulsion on his transcript, it was likely he wouldn’t be welcomed back home, either. Daniel’s cheekbone had still borne the bruise from the blow he’d received from the student who’d stumbled upon them.

_There but for the grace of God go I_ , Castiel had thought, watching him go. Of course, God had nothing to do with any of this. An image of himself and Vernon in each others’ arms, spinning in horror at the sound of a footstep and a shout, had made his blood run cold, and in that moment, he had actually felt grateful for the first time for Vernon’s callous rejection.

He shook himself out of his reverie, shuddering. Deciding that since he hadn’t been given a direct invitation today, he didn’t feel up to braving all the pitfalls of a supper with Dean’s family tonight, Castiel finished cleaning and tidying the classroom and headed for his own house. His daily chores were a distraction, but they passed too quickly, and then he was left with his uneasy thoughts once more. The unpleasant mugginess from yesterday’s rain was oppressive enough that he didn’t really want to further heat his house by using his stove to cook a full supper. Instead, he warmed some leftover beans as quickly as he could, opting to pair it with country ham that didn’t need heating. He tried to delay eating, wondering whether Dean would come to his house or go to Sam’s, but finally his own hunger could no longer be ignored, and he ate alone, not tasting any of it.

He’d only been whatever he was with Dean for one day, and apart from him for hours, but somehow his house seemed full of dark melancholy, and he felt pathetically lonely.

_Ridiculous_ , he told himself firmly. _Dean would laugh at you, if he were here to see._ Instead of permitting himself to mope over having to eat a meal by himself, he reached for one of his books and made himself comfortable against the headboard of his bed.

_Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you,_ _  
_ _You must be he I was seeking…_

A quiet knock pulled him from Whitman’s sweet words of love. Opening the door to the dusky twilight, Castiel was immediately flooded with warmth as he was met with Dean’s handsome face, smiling a little shyly. “Hey, Cas,” he murmured.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas greeted just as softly, moving aside and resisting the urge to grab Dean’s sleeve, pull him inside just that much more quickly.

Dean dropped his bag and stepped into Cas’s space as soon as the door was closed behind him. “Sam missed you at dinner,” he said, reaching for Cas’s hips to bring him even closer.

“Just Sam?”

“Mmm,” Dean hummed, pursing his lips a little. “Maybe Sarah, too.” At Castiel’s feigned look of hurt, Dean huffed a quick laugh, then leaned in for a soft kiss. Pulling back, then, he added, “The boys seemed maybe a little happy not to have Mr. Novak there. Dunno why that would be.”

“That was part of my concern, actually,” Castiel sighed. “So I take it that Jesse hasn’t told Sam or Sarah about his ‘career change’?”

“Not yet, but he will, and soon,” Dean said, sliding his hands up to Cas’s shoulders, rubbing at the tension there. “I’m honestly impressed with him for not getting caught yet, but apparently he’s got a friend playing accomplice, and Jack won’t rat him out, either, so long as he’s afraid of getting in trouble for helping.”

Cas dropped his head to Dean’s chest. “What a mess,” he sighed.

Dean hummed again, and they just held each other. The grip of Castiel’s arms around Dean’s waist was the tangible reassurance of security he’d been missing all evening. “I missed you,” he confessed, feeling bold enough to risk sounding needy.

“Missed you, too,” Dean replied, and Castiel couldn’t hold back the tiny, happy noise that burst from his throat. “I can’t even believe how much,” Dean went on, apparently encouraged. “It was like even though I was surrounded by all the guys, I was still lonely. I, uh, hope it’s okay, since we didn’t talk about it, but I packed an extra shirt in my bag, so I can stay with you again tonight? If you want me to, that is. The guys sort of ripped me a little for having dirty clothes this morning.”

“Dean,” Cas said, earlier anxiety suddenly rising up once more. “Remember what we talked about. If they get suspicious…”

“They won’t.” Dean stroked a hand up into the hair along the back of Castiel’s head, scratching lightly with his fingertips there as he used his other arm to wrap securely around Cas’s back. “I promise, I’m being careful. I’m not going to do anything that might put you in danger.”

“Or you,” Cas added. His voice was muffled, his face pressed into Dean’s shoulder. “You keep yourself safe, too.”

“Course I will,” Dean promised. “So…I can stay?” His voice was hopeful, but he hadn’t really needed to ask. There was nothing on earth that could have convinced Castiel to let Dean out of his sight in that moment.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brakeman - the man who tended to the cars moving through the mine.
> 
> I read a bunch of interviews with old miners who'd worked in the breakers, and I don't know why I was shocked, since I have my own teenage boys and have often said how mystified I am that any othem ever survive and grow up to be men. Throwing rocks and metal at each other was pretty much the safest way they happily entertained themselves when they weren't working. Well, except for swimming in the creeks where the coal dust ran off, turning their skins black from head to toe.


	7. Chapter 7

“…Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” The boy at the front of the classroom, flushed blotchy red and constantly shifting from foot to foot, finally made it to the end of his recitation. His shoulders dropped dramatically in a show of his relief, and he was rushing for his seat before Castiel had even given his approval of the recitation and dismissed him.

“Very good, and you may take your seat, Jimmy,” he said wryly to the already seated boy. The students around him giggled, and Jimmy turned even redder. “Susan, you will recite next.” The primly dressed young lady flounced to the front of the class and launched into Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Obviously imagining herself on a much grander stage than the front of a humble one-room school, she had Castiel drawing upon every bit of his willpower not to let himself react to her dramatics.

_At least nobody’s nodding off anymore,_ he thought. Part of him was actually missing the summer’s warmth at this point; the coal stove warming the school did its job efficiently and enthusiastically, but it seemed there was no middle ground between freezing and Hottest Hell. On top of that, the billowing heat seemed to be linked with a high rate of coal consumption, so he had to add more coal at least twice throughout the school day, since the walls didn’t seem to retain much of the warmth at all once the fires began to die.

Not that Castiel was doing much better at staying focused than his students were, and his own daydreams had nothing to do with an overheated classroom or the first real snow of the season that was visible through the windows, beginning to color the landscape white. He smiled, remembering how Dean had grumbled about it that morning, reluctant to leave the warmth of their bed—Cas’s bed, but one that they had shared more often than not since those first days of nervous exploration.

_“Don’t wanna go out in that stuff,” Dean muttered, squinting out the window at the flakes beginning to fall. “Too cold, and even colder underground. Let’s move someplace warm, okay?”_

_“Today?” Castiel laughed. “Shall we pack up and hop a train out west, maybe? We could buy tall hats and pretend to be cowboys.”_

_“Screw pretending, I’ll be a real one,” Dean said, cracking an actual smile. “Get my own horse and head out on the trails.”_

_Castiel ran a warm hand over Dean’s stomach, lightly scratching and feeling goosebumps rise under his fingertips. “Mmm, sounds nice. Can we ride off into the sunset together?”_

_“Oh, you like to ride?” Dean asked. A moment later, the possible double entendre hit him, and his face went cherry red as Castiel choked on his laughter._

The students had begun to shift and mutter well before Susan had extolled the positive impact of fences upon neighborly relations, and Castiel knew he wasn’t going to get much more out of them. It was close enough to dismissal time that he was willing to throw up his hands in defeat. “Please be careful on the stairs,” he called after the retreating students, knowing it was no good, that at least one bottom would promptly hit the ground when feet slipped on the ice.

“I’ll get the ash,” Jack Winchester offered. All these months later, Jack was still regularly offering his assistance at the end of most school days. Castiel smiled at him in gratitude.

“Thank you, Jack, but the stairs are a bit treacherous. I’ll dump the ash out if you can erase the boards.” Jack got to work, and Cas carefully pulled the ash pan from the base of the stove and carried it to the door. When he stepped outside, the sound of men’s voices around the corner of the building pulled him up short.

“…the school building, for our workers’ sons and daughters,” one voice was saying. Castiel thought he recognized it as the voice of the mine superintendent, though they’d only spoken once since he’d started teaching here. “There’s a couple dozen of them that attend regularly, though of course that varies seasonally. And not all of our laborers are inclined to send their children to school, particularly the recent arrivals. Some of them can barely speak a word of English, you know. Never mind to them that the law says school is compulsory, and what can you do?” The crunch of footsteps through the thin layer of icy snow got louder, and then the men came into view. Yes, that was the superintendent gesturing constantly as he spoke; the man walking next to him was older and heavier, wearing a fine wool coat and hat, and had his hands stuffed into his pockets as he eyed the the building with a slight distaste.

“Well, all we can do is provide, and it’s the sort of gesture that pleases people,” the other man said. The superintendent’s head bobbed with comical speed, like a rubber ball attached to a toy paddle. _His superior, then,_ Castiel realized. He stepped back into the shadow of the door, not wanting to interrupt what was apparently an inspection of the mining town. “We’ve got to keep the workers happy, of course. Happy workers are productive workers! They may not appreciate the efforts just now, flooding in from less enlightened corners of the world, but it’s our moral duty to guide them—like children themselves.” Both men chuckled, and Castiel pressed his lips together, suppressing his indignation.

“Just as you say, sir,” the superintendent agreed. “Between you and me, though, I find it a bit of a waste of effort. I’m sure you know best, but these children won’t need to know how to spell in order to swing a pick or tell coal from rock.”

“Of course not, of course not. But it does keep them occupied, and that means quiet.”

The superintendent snickered again. “Are you talking about the children or the workers, now?” Before the upper manager could respond, the piercing blast of the breaker whistle cut through the air, causing them both to turn their heads in the direction of the mine.

“Damn it,” the superintendent muttered. “Not the end of the shift yet. Someone’s gone and injured themselves, likely. Terrible.” His irritated tone clearly communicating that his sympathies were with those who were losing money during the ceased production, not the man who might be dying or dead that very moment.

It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for the whistle to announce a temporary halt to work, and Castiel’s muscles tensed every time it happened, full of fear that the unfortunate victim would be Dean or Sam. Even the thought that any one of his students’ fathers could be the injured man was awful; when it happened during school, he’d see their young faces swivel toward the windows, and he always ached in sympathetic worry.

“Well, let’s go have a look, then,” the manager sighed, and they turned to trudge in the direction of the whistle. Cas fidgeted awkwardly. There was no clear way for him to trail behind them without raising eyebrows, and trying to follow surreptitiously, moving from shadow to shadow so as not to be seen, was a ludicrous notion. How could he explain what connection he could have with the mine or any of its workers? He was simply an outsider, as far as anyone in power was concerned.

“Mr. Novak?” He’d forgotten Jack was still there in the school room. The boy was white as a sheet, wringing his hands a bit. “You don’t think Jesse could be hurt, do you?”

“Oh, Jack,” Cas said, his heart aching. He wanted to hug the young man, but he wasn’t sure about the appropriateness, or whether Jack would even tolerate such a gesture. Cas thought quickly, looking for a response that wouldn’t sound dismissive. “I know you’re afraid, but consider. There are hundreds of men working in the mine every day. The chances that one particular person, out of all of them, would be injured is slight.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “Only now I have two people there. Three, with Uncle Dean. So it’s more likely than that, you know?” Castiel didn’t have an answer. They stood looking at each other, sharing unspoken fears, and a minute later, their ears caught the sound of the Black Maria’s approaching siren. Rushing together to the door, they watched with held breath as the black-painted automobile bearing the injured man drove away from the mine and headed into town. It turned left as it reached the first houses, and both Castiel and Jack released the air from their lungs in relief.

“I should probably feel guilty for feeling better now,” Jack said in a shaky voice. “I know folks who live down that way, too.”

Appropriate gesture or not, Castiel wrapped an arm around Jack’s shoulders and squeezed. He pretended not to notice when the boy’s breathing grew a little ragged as he did.

\---

“What’s gotten into you, Sissy?” Sam said in frustration as, for the third time since they’d sat down, she’d sent her tin cup flying with a screech. At this point, they were only refilling it with one tiny dribble of water at a time. The thrill of winter weather had worn off quickly when the town had gotten hit with three big snowstorms in three weeks, and nobody wanted to have to run back out to the water pump for anything less than real need.

Sarah ran a hand over her hair, trying to pat the loosened curls back into place. “Probably out of sorts because we spent the day over at the church, and the old matrons kept telling her to shush,” she said. “She wouldn’t stop trying to grab the ornaments or yank at the tinsel, and it was a nightmare trying to get everything decorated.”

“She’s two,” Dean argued. Indignant on the child’s behalf. “I get excited by all the sparkly Christmas stuff, and I’m a grown man. How do those old birds expect a baby to not get wide-eyed and grabby?” He winked at his niece, who promptly stiffened her body and threw her head back against Sam’s chest. Sam winced and plopped her in her high chair, handing her a small piece of hard roll with a little of the homemade apple butter that Castiel had brought with him tonight slathered on it. She eyed the bread, visibly considering whether to throw it, before deciding to gnaw it instead.

“Good choice,” Sam told her, ruffling her curls.

“Well, it’s done, anyway,” Sarah said, “and the whole church looks real nice. We got a gorgeous tree this year, and Alveena even brought over some of her mama’s old glass ornaments from New York. Had to hang those on the upper branches,” she added, giving the baby a fond but fed-up look.

Jack and Jesse were grinning at each other. Now that Jesse’s role as a breaker boy had become public knowledge, evenings at Sam’s house had changed somewhat. As Dean had expected, Sam had been livid when he learned that Jesse had stopped going to school so he could find work, but it had been the lying and sneaking that had made him the angriest. At first, Dean had worried that when Sam learned that Dean already knew, he’d turn his rage on him for not telling Sam and Sarah or putting a stop to it, but Jesse, either through luck or a precociously wise attempt to avoid further family conflict, eased that revelation by stating right away how Uncle Dean scolded him and made him come clean. Sam was still pissed, but at least he knew they were on the same page.

Sarah had cried and tried to argue, but Sam had taken her out back to speak privately for a minute, and when they returned, he took Jesse off by himself for a much longer talk. Dean didn’t ask for the details of their discussion, but when they came back inside, Jesse’s eyes were red, and Sam’s face looked about ten years older than it had. Jesse kept working, but it was a long while before Sam could even glance in the direction of the breaker without getting tight around the eyes, and even now, nobody at the table could bring themselves to point out the black smudge on his neck that Jesse had missed when he’d washed up.

Castiel has been a little uncomfortable about how to handle visiting, too, especially when the topic of Jack’s schoolwork came up, but eventually things had drifted back into a new sort of normal. Now that Christmas celebrations were looming, the entire group found themselves of one mind once more, and so they were all throwing themselves into the subject with great enthusiasm, setting aside their differences with pleasure. Dean watched Cas smile unabashedly at the boys’ description of the snowman army they’d built the previous year, and he felt full of pure contentment. Covering his own roll with the apple butter, Dean couldn’t remember being more relaxed.

“You know, it’s already started,” he said, stripping a piece of meat from the bone on his plate. “The holiday chaos, I mean. Happens every damn—sorry, Sarah—every darn year, where the foremen act like they’ve never gone through this before. Last week, Alastair’s standing there with his slate, couple hours after lunch, and Scott Simons goes walking up to him, saying, ‘Guess I’ll be leaving about hour or so early today,’ and Alastair’s head looked like to explode. He says, ‘Excuse me, and why would you think that?’ and Scott says, ‘Well, I have to be home to light the Hanukkah candles before dark.’ Alastair says, and I’m not kidding, ‘Again?’” Sam and Castiel burst into laughter, and even Sarah chuckled politely. “Like it was a one-time thing last year…or the year before…or before that.”

“You know, the funniest part about that is that Scott told me last year how when he was still in Germany, before he left his family to come over, they weren’t all that observant,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Part of why he keeps kosher and follows all the law now is because he’s homesick and wants to feel connected, but the other part is how it flusters people who don’t understand any of it.”

“I can’t blame him. Some folks need shaking up,” Dean said cheerfully. He was a little nervous that Alastair might find a way to get revenge for being made to look silly, but it was a small danger, and Scott was a good worker. “And you know that the Orthodox guys don’t even start celebrating their Christmas until January. Mine won’t shut down for that, but they’ll party then, anyway, and they’ll all still take advantage of the other Christmas festivities to have some fun, too.”

“Well, wouldn’t you?” Castiel said, cocking one eyebrow and smirking. Something about the teasing look hit Dean the right way, and he felt his blood try to rush southward in a manner inconvenient for sitting at his brother’s supper table. He cleared his throat and grabbed for his water, trying to cool the sudden heat of his skin.

“Don’t drown,” Sam joked, nudging at his shoulder. Dean made a face at him, then spent a few minutes focusing on his food and not the man sitting across from him.

“Well, I just hope that the managers give out hams instead of turkeys this year, and no offense to Scott for that,” Sam went on. “I’m grateful for the gift, but there’s wild turkeys all over the woods, and I’ve got no problem shooting my own. Boar’s harder to come by, and the company hams they give aren’t near as gamey as the wild meat, anyway.”

“So, a hammy for Sammy,” Dean said cheerfully. “Is that a good enough Christmas, kids? What do you think?” Immediately, the room was loud with shouts of wishes for candy, toys, and trinkets. Dean laughed as he tried to keep up with the stream of wishes, taking special joy in how, despite his attempts to be “a man,” Jesse couldn’t help reverting to the boy he actually was when presented with the opportunity.

“Hey, how about you, Cas?” he finally asked when things had settled back down a little. “What do you hope Santa will throw in his sack for you this year?”

“Oh,” Castiel said, startled. “I don’t suppose I’ve thought about it. Hmmm, let me think.” He looked up toward the ceiling, tapping a finger on his cheek. “Maybe…a new, harder paddle for the classroom?” Jack and Jesse squealed with giggles, Jesse elbowing Jack with a wicked grin. Castiel winked at them, and Dean fought to hold back an unexpected shudder.

“I could probably carve you one, if you didn’t want to wait for Christmas,” Sam spoke up, almost startling Dean. The boys laughed again, and Cas pretended to consider it for a moment.

“Truthfully, though, I have all that I need,” Castiel said with a genuine smile of happiness. “A year ago, I don’t think I could have imagined being as satisfied with my life as I am right now.”

“Oh, but there must be something you’re wanting. Even something small, or a comfort item,” Sarah prompted. “Won’t your family send presents from home?”

Castiel sighed. “That’s unlikely,” he said. Dean knew that none but one of Cas’s siblings would even know where to send gifts if they wanted to, but Cas hadn’t confided that information in anyone else, and Dean hadn’t shared it, either. “I suppose, though, that if I were to name one holiday gift tradition I miss, it would be an old family one. When I was a boy, before my mother passed, we had a ritual of opening one gift on Christmas Eve, before going to bed. It was always a book, and…” He paused, eyes far away as he remembered. “Those were some of the fondest memories I have. I remember curling under my blankets, long after my brothers had fallen asleep and it had grown too dark to make out the words on the pages, and I would just run my fingers over the bindings, tracing the letters on the covers. It was…formative,” he finished.

The mental picture of a young Cas, snuggling his books to fall asleep, sounded too damn adorable for words, but Dean also couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sorrow, wishing there had been more physical comfort, from family or friends, surrounding Cas when he was so small and alone. No wonder his books were still so important to him; sometimes it sounded as though they’d been more of a family to him than his actual family had been.

He’d been working on Christmas ideas for a little while, trying to come up with the perfect way to show Cas how much he had come to care for him. Loved him, for certain now, though he was still hesitant to use the word out loud. Most folks in town didn’t exchange gifts outside of their own families, other than candy for the little ones, and it would certainly raise questions if he and Cas did otherwise, but nobody had to know about this, any more than they knew about anything else the two of them did behind closed doors. Sitting back once more and watching the lively banter between all the people he cherished most in the world, he started making more plans in his head.

\---

The company store wasn’t the finest or largest general store Dean had ever seen, but it had the benefit of proximity, as well as the sanction of mine company management. The store owner was actually a brother-in-law to one of the foremen, so there was always an unspoken pressure to do one’s shopping there, or else risk being reassigned to less-desirable jobs. Nepotism was hardly the worst thing anybody around town had to navigate. Anyway, using the company store meant that he didn’t even need to bring money; every mine employee had their own charge book in which purchases were written, and on payday, the amount owed could be deducted automatically and applied to the debt. That was sometimes dangerous, of course, if one didn’t keep careful track of what was being spent, but Dean didn’t have so many regular expenses that it ever became an issue.

He wasn’t all that bothered with being pushed into using the store, either, since the prices for what he wanted weren’t much higher than anywhere else within a day’s travel. Dean’s basket was already weighty with some comic books and a couple of model airplane kits for his nephews, along with a funny-looking teddy bear for little Mary. He’d found a Pyrex pie plate with a pretty scalloped edge that Sarah would like, and knowing that Sam had been needing a new set of gloves made his present easy to choose. He’d thrown in some bags of bulk candy for everyone, and the shopping was pretty much done in almost no time.

Now he was standing in front of the shop’s small selection of books, frowning in uncertainty. In one hand, he held a beautiful, heavy book called _The Revolt of the Angels_ , which looked daunting but appealed to Dean on an aesthetic level. For one thing, it was about angels, and Dean appreciated the idea of giving an angel book to a man named after one. For another thing, the angel in the story wasn’t some devout creature, pious to a fault; from the bits Dean was seeing, the angel was passionate and conflicted, torn between a love of the world and his sense of duty. He thought Castiel would enjoy the book a lot, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t seen it on his shelf already.

In his other hand, he had a volume of poems. Specifically, it was a book of love poems, bound in deep red with letters in gilt on the front. He’d flipped it open, and the first lines he’d read were almost freakishly appropriate:

… _But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth_ _  
_ _I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs._

The poet’s emotion was exactly on the mark, because if Dean picked this book, it was as blatant a declaration as if he paired it with a bunch of roses and a ring. Somehow, it felt every bit as intimate as being naked together, just as vulnerable. He thought he should probably be nervous about that, but he wasn’t. Dean imagined Castiel curled in the sheets of his bed, the warm skin of his broad chest lit by the glow of his oil lamp, running those long fingers over the golden letters on the cover of this book, slowly, gently…

He put both books in his basket. Hell with it, there’d be the extra turkey or ham coming from the company for Christmas; that would be at least a few meals for which he wouldn’t have to pay.

Decision made, he turned briskly to head for the clerk’s counter, then jumped in surprise when he nearly ran straight into Sam’s chest, arms folded across it. Sam was looking at him with narrowed eyes, and there was no indication of how long he’d been standing there watching. Hoping for the best, Dean threw an arm over his basket to hide the contents. “Trying to get a peek at your present early, Sammy? No fair cheating. You can wait until Santa comes, just like everybody else.”

“Oh, so I’m the reason you’re poring over books of love poetry, blushing and grinning like an idiot? Man, I hate to tell you this, but I’ve already got a wife.” Sam might have been joking, but his face was unamused. “So who’s the girl, Dean?”

Dean’s mind froze. How to cover it up? Make up a girlfriend? No good; Sam would either know he was lying or demand that Dean bring her by the house. Refuse to say, tell him it was none of his business? Not after a lifetime of basically living in each others’ pockets. “How do you know it’s not for me?” he said, a little more defensiveness in his voice than he’d meant. “What, am I not allowed to shop for myself sometimes, too?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Please, Dean, spare me. You, read poetry? If you’re going to lie, at least try to make it a convincing one.”

_Ouch._ Dean felt the dismissive words prick at him, but he shoved down the hurt as quickly as it rose. It wasn’t as if he’d ever let Sam into that part of his life. The division between the macho, goofy public persona that he wore around other people and the quieter, more sensitive part of himself that he could be when he was by himself was something he’d had to create early on, letting him get through that painful period where he’d forced himself to grow up far faster than was probably healthy. Maybe leaving school and starting work wasn’t unusual for the boys in his town, and maybe the adjustment wasn’t too bad for many of them, but Dean had spent a lot of nights, especially that first year, biting his lip in bed at night so Dad would never know he was being anything less than “a man” about it. Men didn’t cry. Men didn’t do a lot of things, especially things like reading “sissy books.”

Castiel knew he liked poetry, and he didn’t think any less of him for it.

Now wasn’t the time to process any of those thoughts, though. He went for a half-truth instead. “There’s no girl, Sam,” he growled, trying to step around his brother. Sam stepped in the same direction, refusing to let him pass.

“I know that,” he said in a quiet voice. He looked from side to side, seeing nobody else around, then sighed. “Look, put down the basket for a second?” He waited for Dean to put his purchases on the counter and signal to the clerk that he’d be right back for them, then pulled him to a corner in the back of the store. Once there, though, he hesitated, looking uncertain. Dean didn’t bother hiding his irritation.

“If you’ve got something you want to say, Sam—”

“You think I don’t know, Dean?” He almost whispered, which pulled Dean up short. Sam stared intently into his eyes, serious as the grave. “You are not nearly as subtle as you think you are. He’s better, but I know you. I _know._ ”

Dean’s mind raced through possible responses. “ _What are you talking about?”_ Nope, playing dumb wouldn’t fly. “ _You don’t know anything, because there’s nothing to know.”_ As though he’d ever really been able to lie convincingly to Sam.

“What…” Dean’s voice caught, and he coughed to clear it. His stomach was in knots, and he couldn’t read a thing in his brother’s face about what was going to happen next. “What are you…”

“Breathe,” Sam said firmly. “It’s okay. I’m not trying to…Jesus, Dean. It’s me. Did you think I’d hit you or something?” When Sam put a hand on his shoulder, Dean realized that he’d adopted a defensive posture, shrinking in on himself. “Stop panicking. I’m not mad, and I’m not going to…c’mon, man, you know me.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, trying to pull himself together. Taking a deep breath, he made himself stand up straight once more. “I do. I know that you’re not going to say anything, and you and I are going to forget we had this talk, okay? Sarah doesn’t know anything, does she?”

“No, of course not,” Sam hissed, frowning. “Like I said, I can see it because I can pretty much read you like a book, but I’m probably the only one who can. But I don’t think you get what I’m saying. Do you have any idea—”

“No, Sam, I’ve got no clue,” Dean breathed angrily. “I’m sneaking around, keeping secrets, and hiding one of the biggest and best things that has ever happened to me because I have _no idea._ But why don’t you tell me? Explain it all to me, Sammy. Tell me how much of an idiot I am.”

Sam looked stunned by his outburst. “I don’t think you’re an idiot,” he said in a hurt tone. “I can’t even imagine what this feels like for you. All I want for you—all I’ve ever really wanted was for you to be happy. And you look happy, you…both do. But I also want you to be _safe,_ Dean.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t have to worry about that. I know what I’m doing, and we’re going to be fine. Just…just leave it alone, Sammy.” After a long moment, Sam nodded without saying anything. Dean gave him a tiny smile, relieved that they’d reached an agreement. “Now, if you don’t mind either turning your back or closing your eyes, I actually do have your Christmas present in that basket, and it’s not sappy poetry.”

“As long as it isn’t another book of paper dolls or packet of hair ribbons, I think I’ll be happy,” Sam teased back. If it was a little weak, neither of them felt inclined to mention it.

One week later, standing in the decorated church fellowship hall for the town Christmas Eve party, Dean felt Sam’s eyes burning into the back of his neck, but he couldn’t have cared less. Nothing could have made him pull his own eyes away from the sight of Castiel, standing next to the church organ, where a handful of elderly women and men had sweetly browbeaten him into joining them in singing carols. Cas had protested all the way to the end that he wasn’t much of a singer, but the matrons had refused to budge from their demand, insisting that his bass was exactly what they needed for “Silent Night,” and Cas had finally caved, laughing. Now he was apparently having a grand time (thanks in part to the holiday generosity of old man Turner, singing tenor, and the ever-present flask of whiskey in his pocket) and the roll of his deep voice was carrying throughout the whole church: “Oh, tidings of comfort and joy!” Castiel hadn’t been lying; he wasn’t a skilled vocalist. That didn’t matter one bit to Dean, who thought the whole scene was priceless and perfect.

The impromptu choir finished their performance with hugs and cheerful promises to get together again soon. Castiel was flushed with embarrassment, excitement, and alcohol, and his gummy grins and sparkling eyes had Dean halfway across the church toward him before he was aware he’d started moving. Pushing his way through the line of workers waiting for their hams and a few knots of small children chattering about what they hoped Santa would bring, Dean reached Cas’s side wearing his own exhilarated grin. “Hey, Cas,” he said warmly. “Some singing, there.”

“I did warn them,” Cas said with a chuckle. “Was it terrible?”

“Nah, we’re all used to Rufus’s voice by now.” Castiel snorted, turning to make sure old man Turner wasn’t within earshot, then gave Dean a mock scolding look. Dean held up both hands in surrender. “It’s Christmas! Everybody loved it. Now, do you want your present? I have it on good authority that at least one gift needs to be opened early, and I’m a sucker for tradition.”

“Oh, are you?” Cas sounded suspicious, but he was smiling broadly.

“Sure,” Dean said with a shrug and a smile. “Old ones and new, both. Interested?”

Castiel’s glow of happiness was brilliant, and the two of them managed to slip away from the church without being stopped or noticed—other than by one person. As he pulled his winter coat onto his arms before leaving, Dean cast a glance over his shoulder and found Sam watching from across the room. For a moment, they just looked at each other, and then Sam dropped his head and turned away.

Cas was standing a little ways off from the church door, gazing up at the bright moonlight. Snowflakes were falling on his upturned face, and he looked like a vision of peace. Dean approached him, footsteps crunching loudly, but Cas didn’t turn his head. “Silent night, holy night,” he murmured. “Son of God, love’s pure light.”

“I don’t know about ‘silent’ or ‘holy,’ but I think you might be onto something with that last part,” Dean said, stomach fluttering as he studied Cas’s handsome profile.

“Mmm, am I?” Cas said, looking back at Dean out of the corner of his eye, a smirk on his lips. He dropped his chin then, turning to face Dean fully. Holding Dean’s eyes with his own, not looking away for a second, Cas reached for his hands. “Merry Christmas, my love,” he said.

Dean thought he would burst. “Am I?”he said, giving Cas’s question back to him. They’d played with the word, tentative and shyly hinting, since that first night when Dean had put it out between them, but something about the way it felt tonight felt more like a promise.

“Tonight, and always,” Castiel said, warm hands holding firm.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, here's a bit of fun trivia I learned while researching all this! Apparently, men having sex with other men around this time and before were far more likely to have anal sex than oral. Reason: hygiene. If your partner wasn't bathing on the regular, your desire to go putting your face down there was...diminished. (Dean was very, very lucky to have access to the bath house. Cas just prioritized cleanliness enough to make extra effort.)
> 
> The reference to the Jewish worker is a special one. I went to college with a guy by that name, and he took a cynically sad sort of pride in being one of the only Jewish people he knew in the area. He even wrote a song once to this effect. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiJg2a9t4E) He's awesome.
> 
> "The Revolt of the Angels" is by Anatole France; the love poem Dean read was "Earth, My Likeness," from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass."


	8. Chapter 8

“Look alive!” Benny boomed, startling Dean with a clap on the back as he passed. Dean jumped, nearly splashing his coffee over his chest, then glared at Benny’s retreating back, which was shaking with laughter. He couldn’t hang onto his irritation for long though, and he ruefully admitted to himself that his friend wasn’t wrong, though his assumptions about the reasons for Dean’s preoccupation were off. The first time this morning that his crew had caught him with his head in the clouds, there had been much joking at his expense about hangovers and his having spent the night “riding the white mule.” The last time Dean had so much as touched moonshine was more than a year past, but it was easier to let them believe he was suffering the effects of a long night of drinking than to invent another story. The truth was so much sweeter, but that was his alone, to keep close to his heart.

Late February in the mountains was unpredictable, but it was inevitably colder than a well-digger’s backside. It hadn’t felt chilly at all, though, last night when Dean had lain naked, writhing under Castiel’s hands and lips. The well-stoked coal stove could only account for so much, as their heated flesh grew slick with sweat when they moved together. Dean hadn’t thought he could burn much hotter, but then Castiel had paused in his thrusts to lean close, warm breath beside his ear raising goosebumps, and warned him that neighbors might hear his cries, then muffled his groans with fingers pressed between his lips and against his tongue…

Yes, Benny had a _very_ good point about Dean’s mental whereabouts today. His head was still planted firmly in that bed, and it wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

For all that it was a dismal, grey day, Dean was walking under sunny skies, warmed from within by his thoughts. Even the irritated grumbling Alastair had been doing all morning long couldn’t shake his spirits, though he’d made effort not to allow his joy to show itself in smiles or whistling. He’d kept his face serious when he’d made his reports, especially since it was obvious from the start that they weren’t going to be well-received. There was nothing ambiguous about how the flame in the safety lamp had immediately died within moments of stepping into the first chamber along the Tamarack chute; Dean had thrown a hand over his own face and tried to breathe shallowly until he got back out, heading immediately for the surface to order a new vent hole to be punched. It was a time-consuming job, and Alastair hadn’t stopped whining about it, but Dean had refused to budge an inch. The foreman had even tried changing tactics, abruptly launching into a series of questions about whether little Jesse was happy in his current capacity as breaker boy, or whether he might not be more fulfilled working as a spragger, getting lots of “healthy exercise” running alongside the swiftly moving mine carts. (Dean would be talking to the driver boss, of course; thankfully, they were on very friendly terms, and he was fairly confident he could get the man to insist he didn’t need any new spragger boys if Alastair tried it. Excitement and exercise aside, jamming wooden sprags between wheel spokes in order to slow down the carts was one of the more deadly jobs available.)

The vent hole had eaten up a good chunk of the morning, and it was only now, a little before lunch break, that the crew had been able to move on to more routine tasks. Production along the chute had resumed and Alastair had ceased lurking in Dean’s perimeter, sending him nasty looks. Dean had set the men to a few minor abatements, then settled in to finish up paperwork, but his brain simply refused to focus on the figures and minutia of it all, wandering away from the pages as he gazed into the distance.

_After lunch,_ he decided. After all, a man couldn’t be expected to concentrate on an empty stomach. Most of the bosses were huddled by the potbelly stove in the operations building, but no amount of comfort would be worth trying to digest his lunch under Alastair’s smirking stare or while listening to the smug disregard for the laborers that regularly spewed from the mouths of the upper managers. Instead, he found an empty stool just inside the mouth of the mine, where the wind was blocked and the trappers in charge of the gangway door had managed to bribe their way into a steady rotation of heated bricks coming from friends working the boiler. Dean propped his feet on a hot brick and sat back with his lunch pail, watching the bustle of site buzzing around him.

He’d barely settled himself when the door to the breaker burst open, releasing a flood of boys apparently intent on burying each other in trampled, muddy snow. As he watched, Jesse dashed across the yard and up the side of the culm bank, scooping up a handful of snow—and gravel and dirt, almost definitely—to cram down the shirt collar of another kid, who howled as the boys around him cackled. It was chaotic and wild, and Jesse appeared to be fitting right in, having the time of his life.

Dean rested his chin in his hand, bracing his elbow against his knee, as he studied the cheerfully warring pack. He still worried, of course, and he didn’t think he’d ever fully stop. But none of his biggest fears had yet come to pass, and the honest truth was that Jesse had never really had a different future in mind for himself. Jack was the sort of boy with big plans and dreams, who wanted to see the world and explore; Jesse’s biggest thoughts had involved nothing more lofty than a happy family, a groaning dinner table, and friends to fill his hours with jokes and fun. He was getting what he’d always wanted, and…well, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing as all that. If only it could have been delayed at least another handful of years.

If Dean had thought a piece of cold leftover pork roast and some brown bread would be enough to pull his attention back to his work, he’d been absurdly optimistic. The only thing the end of lunch brought with it was a strong impatience for the day to be done so that he could get back to Cas, to their snug little haven of peace and privacy. He wasn’t even thinking just about the sex anymore; now his thoughts turned to what they might cook together for a supper. A couple of weeks before, Castiel had roasted and mashed some turnips with some dried herbs, and it had been startlingly good. Maybe they could have those again, along with some ham biscuits and mustard. Apple pie? Was there any of that left over from when he’d baked that weekend? Cas had helped with the crust, and he’d gotten flour on the bridge of his nose, which had made Dean helpless to resist kissing him, pulling him close…

Once again lost to distraction, the shift leader had to shout his name a few times before Dean realized he was being called. “Hey, we need you to get down into Elkhorn chute, on the west side! Tell your boys we got stinkdamp, and in a bad way.”

“Shit,” Dean hissed, clambering to his feet. “You sure?” The man gave him a disgusted look, and Dean waved a hand in acknowledgment of the stupid question. Of all the things in the mine that could poison a man, stinkdamp’s rotten egg stench was pretty damn hard to miss. One of the miners must have messed up with firing an explosive in the seam there, leaving a small fire to burn unnoticed; incomplete combustion was the surest cause of a stinkdamp release. “Get ‘em out of there, if you haven’t already.”

“Already done. Wasn’t like I could convince ‘em to keep working at this point, not this time. Smell’s so bad, half the men say their heads are aching bad enough to head home early, maybe, so you know it’s foul. Had two guys puke when we first started smelling it.”

Dean, who had already started marching off toward where his crew was working in another chute, paused and turned. “Wait, how long has it been? When did your guys first start complaining?”

“Been a few hours, I guess,” the shift leader hazarded. “Got another car and a half full after that and before we broke for lunch.”

“And why in hottest hell did you not come to me at that point?” Livid, Dean didn’t bother to stop moving. Hydrogen sulfide gas in built-up quantities was more than capable of killing men, knocking them out and paralyzing their lungs. Even if the gassed men managed to walk out of the mine on their own two feet, the effects of breathing in the stinkdamp could stick around for weeks, causing wet lungs, dizziness, and other fun shit.

“Was going to,” the man argued, getting irritated right back. “Ran into the foreman first, and he said you were too busy with more important issues. He told me you said that if there were any problems with gas, we were just supposed to run our lamp flame along the spot to keep it from building up, and you’d get back to us when you had time. Don’t see how you get off layin’ into me for following directions, when you were too busy to care before now.”

Blood pounded in Dean’s ears, preventing him from hearing anything else. “Get back to your men,” he spat through gritted teeth. “Make sure everybody’s breathing okay. If anybody starts having trouble or gets dizzy, call the ambulance, don’t even wait for the doc.” He spotted Victor just ahead, at the mouth of the first chute, and he stalked toward him as fast as he could move his rigidly angry muscles. “Vic, get the crew and head to Elkhorn, masks and goggles on. They’re going to need to sink a major borehole, immediately, but the chambers are damp as hell and liable to spark.” Vic read the gravity of the situation on his face and didn’t ask any unnecessary questions.

Running on aggression, Dean fully intended to grab his own bag of tools and join them in setting up the fan they’d need to use before they could even attempt to drill down from above without blowing up the entire chute, but he hadn’t gone more than twenty feet back outside of the mine when he ran straight into the one man he both had hoped to avoid and fiercely wanted to confront. Rationally, he knew full well that no good could come out of the situation until he managed to cool off a little. It seemed that fate had opted to take that decision out of his hands, and his reckless side rejoiced.

“Did I correctly hear that you’ve stopped production for a second time today?” Alastair snapped, not bothering with a polite facade this time. “After our earlier conversations? My patience is thin, Dean.”

“Yeah, well, mine is gone,” Dean fired back. “Men might actually have died—might still die—because you lied and were so focused on your _production schedule_ that you had them working in a room filled with _toxic gas._ That’s not just careless! That’s incompetent at best, and fucking _murder_ if they hadn’t given up and come out of there on their own! You didn’t even pass on the message to me, which was—”

“I am the foreman here, Mr. Winchester, and you have truly forgotten your place if you think you can speak to me like this. Losing your temper, just as you continually lose sight of priority—”

“Oh, _fuck_ your priorities, Alastair!” Red, blinding rage swept over Dean’s vision, and he had his fists balled in Alastair’s jacket. Alastair’s eyes widened for a moment, but then they filled with a dangerous light that would have sent ice through Dean’s veins if he’d been at all capable of feeling anything but fury anymore. “Your priorities put profits over lives, and if there’s any justice, they’ll put you in a prison cell, if not the ground!”

“You think there’s anywhere I’m going that you’re not coming, too?” Alastair sneered, ignoring Dean’s grip on him as if it wasn’t worthy of his notice. “Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing you can accuse me of doing that doesn’t bear your signature as well. Your little diatribe is a joke, Dean, and believe me, you won’t be laughing when you’re paid back for it.”

_I’m sorry, Sam._ Dean hardened his face, hiding his reaction. “If that’s what it takes—” Before he finished his sentence, a sudden, low rumbling noise rose from behind him, quiet and deep. Silence fell all around the mine yard, as men who had been rushing around or who had stopped, unnoticed by Dean, to watch them fight now stopped everything and turned to stare toward the mine opening. The rumbling stopped almost as soon as it started, but it was enough to shatter the violent spell that had gripped Dean. Without thought for anything but his men, he released Alastair’s jacket, pushing him away, and spun toward the gangway door into the mine, standing halfway open from the team of mules that had pulled a car through it a minute before. In the heavy stillness still holding the watching crowd, Dean could just barely hear voices, deep baritone shouts raised in urgency.

Though there should have been light visible from lamps in the dimness, there was a heavy blanket of dust rising in the air, making it difficult to see whether there was any light in the direction in which his crew had headed. This was bad, very bad. Alastair was white-faced and fuming behind Dean; as foreman on duty, there was little chance that culpability was going to skip him entirely, though Dean knew he’d do his best to slither out of any blame, pinning it anywhere else he thought it would stick. That didn’t matter one bit to Dean right now. He knew protocol involved calling company rescue teams, checking gas levels before entering, strapping on safety gear. He’d been trained in mine rescue as part of his certification, and all of that training was flying through his head, but his body, already adrenaline filled, refused to stop moving.

“Dean!” Sam’s shout was loud enough to make the men around him jump as he rushed to Dean’s side.

“Don’t try to stop me, Sam,” Dean said, tone allowing for no argument. “That’s Benny down there, and Vic and Garth, and I’m not waiting until I can’t hear their voices anymore to do something.” Sam started to say something else, and Dean interrupted. “And no, you stay up here. I need you to keep that gangway door open, no matter what, even if the company teams try to close it.” They would try, since protocol said to cut off air currents that might spread fires, but Dean hoped he wouldn’t be down there long enough for the risk to be too bad.

Wearing a mask of stony determination, Sam planted himself by the doorway, looking as though he wouldn’t be moved by anything short of the Second Coming. He slapped Dean on the back as Dean ran past and down the incline into the hazy darkness, an unspoken benediction between them. Then there was nothing but choking dust, the thick odor of sulfur, and the sound of his thudding footsteps as Dean sprinted over the uneven ground.

“Give me a shout!” he called, already feeling a little disoriented. Slight swing to the right, then straight ahead, feel along the wall with one hand to make sure he wasn’t weaving and likely to run into a corner. “Who’s on their feet? Anyone hurt?”

“Brother, is that you?” Benny’s voice was hoarse, and he coughed hard. Dean cursed, trying to move faster. “Vic and I are banged up some, but Garth ain’t lookin’ so good.”

As Benny finished, Dean finally got close enough to see the faint light of the one remaining unbroken safety lamp left to the crew. In the small circle of light, Garth sat propped against a wall, conscious but dazed. His ankle was quite obviously broken badly, with his foot hanging in the wrong direction. All three men were filthy and covered in black dust, scraped and bloodied as well. Vic, kneeling over Garth, heaved a groan of relief that echoed around the chute when he saw Dean.

“You can tell me what happened when we get out of here,” Dean said, keeping a sleeve over his mouth to try to block the thick dust. It was obvious to him, anyway; the crew looked to have been in the process of using a fan to direct the gaseous air in the direction of some boreholes further down the chute, but something—maybe one of their safety lamps, with the gust blowing the flame through the tiny holes, or maybe just the earlier fire started by the miners—had ignited the gas trapped in the rock, which knocked down half a nearby wall when it blew. They were lucky it hadn’t brought down the whole roof.

Benny lifted Garth, draping him across his broad shoulders, and coughed again as he stood. “You lead the way,” he said. “Stinkdamp has my eyes stinging so I can barely see.” He put a hand on Dean’s shoulder so he could stumble along, and they set out for the door. It became apparent before they were even clear of the chamber that moving at that speed wouldn’t get them out nearly as fast as they needed; Vic was coughing and choking, too, and Benny was limping from an injury Dean couldn’t see.

“You give me Garth,” he decided. “Then Vic’ll lead you both out faster, and I’ll be behind. You guys need to get out of this air as fast as you can before it kills you.” Benny didn’t protest, a sure sign that he was hurting more than he was letting on. Dean tried to be gentle as they transferred Garth to lie over his shoulder, trying not to shudder at the disturbing feel of limp arms and head flopping weakly along his back.

“Move!” he bellowed, and they started off at a stumbling trot toward the entrance. The gas was starting to get to Dean now, as well, especially since he couldn’t cover his mouth and nose while also hanging onto Garth. He was slowing down, tripping almost as much as Benny and Vic, who at least were only carrying their own weight. Thank God it wasn’t far to the exit; he couldn’t see it—shouldn’t he be able to see it by now?—but he didn’t think he’d had to go too deep on the way down, so it must be close.

Another rumble, much louder now that he was under the ground, shook the walls around them. Dean momentarily lost his footing, and Garth’s body slid sideways, almost slipping off his shoulder. Trying desperately not to drop him, Dean staggered to the side, lurching as he fought for stability. His hip struck something hard—one of the support pillars, from the rough surface that scraped him. The sudden shifting of that solid, immovable buttress was the last thing he’d expected to feel, and he had no chance to process what that might mean before he was slammed forward by a massive blow to the back of his head. Blinding, sparkling pain stole the air from his lungs, and he was falling forward, legs crumpling under him, unconscious before he could even hit the ground.

\---

The shrill noise of the breaker whistle cut through the sound of the primary students reciting their sums in unison, making them all jump, then giggle nervously. “Continue,” Castiel said quellingly, trying to cover his own reaction to the alarm. There was no point in adding to the tension in the room.

The boys and girls started chanting together again, voices sing-songing their way through the numbers, as Castiel forced himself to breathe deeply and try to slow his racing heart. Never mind that the whistle blew unexpectedly as often as once a week; he could never get used to the sound, or to the idea of what it likely heralded. He wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to lose the shock he felt about it. The mine didn’t shut down for “small” injuries, broken hands or a crushed foot. In order for everything to come to a grinding halt, he’d learned, the accident had to be major enough to require a cleared passage for a stretcher, or perhaps the stopping of a piece of machinery contributing to a grisly tragedy. Something truly horrible was happening every time the piercing blast sounded across the valley, and Cas shuddered, struggling not to picture it, futile in his efforts to avoid imagining anything happening to Dean.

“Copy these sums into your own books, now, and study them at home. There will be a test tomorrow,” he said, ignoring the quiet grumbling. “Now, then, upper grades, please take out your readers and turn to page one hundred fifty-six, ‘The Relief of Lucknow.’”

Setting the older students to reading out loud in turns, Castiel’s mind drifted restlessly, not settling on anything at all, as he drummed his fingers against his own thigh. He rather wished the class had been at a different page in their readers; “Lucknow” was meant to be uplifting, celebrating an unlikely victory and rescue from certain massacre in battle, but his nerves didn’t appreciate the dramatic intensity of the narrative.

Barely listening to the reading, his attention was abruptly caught by quick movement outside the window. A small figure was running at a dead sprint, heading from the mine toward the village. Castiel squinted, studying. The dark curls whipping, the brown coat with red elbows…it was Jesse. Why was Jesse running breakneck speed toward home? If he had been sent for the ambulance—the telephone line could be broken, the doctor could be away from his office—wouldn’t he be heading toward the part of town with the businesses, not toward, oh God, his own family, legs pumping frantically as he pushed himself to what was clearly the very limit of his abilities…

Castiel was standing. His eyes wouldn’t focus, his brain wouldn’t _think._ The student reading had stuttered to a halt, looking uncertain as the silence stretched and Castiel stood frozen in place. _I have to…what? But I can’t just sit here._ “Class, I’m suddenly feeling quite ill. Please, I’m sorry. You can…you are dismissed for the day.” The children looked at each other dubiously, but they weren’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and they were quickly gathering their things and scrambling to escape before he changed his mind. Jack lingered, looking concerned, until Castiel waved a hand at him, trying to appear reassuring. There was no point in alarming the boy over what was almost definitely an overreaction on his part.

Castiel’s legs felt strangely stiff, as though he was moving through the fog of a lucid dream. He didn’t even think to grab his coat, not remembering the oversight until he noticed that he was beginning to shiver, but he was over halfway to the mine by then, and turning around to go back was unthinkable. Had he locked the door to the school? No matter. He could go back after he’d found Dean, found him and told him how ridiculous he’d been, and Dean had laughed and squeezed his arm comfortingly, a pale promise of the actual embrace he’d give when they were alone tonight.

There were crowds of men standing idle in the yard—no, not idle, but milling slowly, uncomfortably. Up ahead, hidden by the bodies of workers, was a disturbance. Cas heard shouting, angry and urgent. That was Sam’s voice, he recognized now. Sam’s, and the sibilant whine of the thin foreman who’d mocked and toyed meanly with him all those months ago. Alastair, who Dean hated. Castiel couldn’t understand their words, overlapping and violent, but when he pushed through the crowd, he saw that Sam was chest to chest with the man, eyes glinting with murder.

Beyond them in the yard, stepping out from the darkness of the tunnel into the overcast greyness of the dismal afternoon, were two men, broadly built and covered in grime and blood. Other men were surrounding them and trying to support them, which was something they surely needed; the men were barely staying upright, coughing and choking and limping as they pulled themselves into the light. The man in front was shorter and might have been darker in tone than the other, though it was hard to see through the black dust, and in his arms he was somehow managing, impossibly, to half carry and half drag the limp body of another man, much smaller and quite unconscious. Behind them, the second and much larger man staggering out was weaving from side to side, on the edge of collapse. He, too, was dragging a person, tucked under his arm and dangling. The limp body was…

No. _No!_

He must have shouted his denial out loud, because suddenly eyes were turning to stare, but it didn’t matter, it _didn’t matter_. He was running the last few steps forward to where the big man had fallen to his knees, only just managing to keep Dean ( _i_ _t_ was _Dean, oh God, oh God_ ) from hitting the ground as he did. Castiel dropped to his own knees beside them, helping the man with Dean’s weight as they settled him gently, keeping his head up out of the mud and the snow. _His face is so pale, he’ll be cold, oh, Dean…_

The muttering around him was an unintelligible buzz. He didn’t try to make out any words as he ran his hands over Dean, looking for the injury, searching for what was keeping him from opening his eyes, from smiling and murmuring a warm greeting. “Dean, you’ve got to wake up now, please. Please, you can’t do this. It’s not fair, and I can’t…you have to open your eyes now, Dean, I need you to—I need you. Oh, God, Dean, please.” Cas’s hands stroked through the back of Dean’s hair, and he froze at the feeling of wetness. He slowly slid his hand out, and felt his own vision begin to go fuzzy and pale. His palm, covered in red blood, stood out starkly against the dirty snow. “No…no…”

Castiel felt, rather than saw, the stirring in his peripheral vision as the crowd of men parted, making way for the boxy black ambulance trundling through the mud. Two men jumped out of the front, heading briskly toward where he knelt, the knees of his pants slowly soaking through. He hardly registered any of it, his mind praying a constant refrain of “ _Please, please, please_ ” and “ _No, no, no._ ” One of the men tried to lift Dean’s head from Castiel’s lap, and his hands gripped tighter, clenching in Dean’s shirt collar and refusing to relinquish their hold.

“Sir, I need you to step back.” Castiel shook his head, both a denial and an attempt to clear the fog. He felt bigger hands grabbing his shoulders, and he attempted to struggle, but the person holding him was strong and stubborn.

“Castiel, let him go,” a voice said low in his ear. “Castiel. You have to come with me. Dean needs you to let go.” He turned his head, staring into the deep hazel eyes of Sam, cautiously staring. In a quiet, careful voice, Sam added, “Everyone here cares about Dean.” _Everyone is watching. You are surrounded by people whose attentions are focused on Dean, and they are all watching this, seeing and hearing you._

Cas allowed Sam to pull him back, hands numbly falling away from Dean’s shirt. The ambulance drivers carefully lifted Dean, shoulders and hips, and shifted him onto a nearby stretcher. When they slid the stretcher into the back of the vehicle and closed the doors, hiding his deathly still body from view, Castiel couldn’t help the strangled, wounded sound that escaped his throat. Sam’s hands tightened a fraction, still holding fast to his arms as though he was afraid that if he let go, Cas would throw himself into the ambulance as well.

None of the crowd seemed to know how to disperse, even as the motor chugged to life and the ambulance made its swift way toward the main road and the highway in the direction of the hospital. Something about the emotional tension of the moment gripped every man there, though eyes were determinedly averted, not looking anywhere near where Castiel stood trembling, still gazing in shock at the place where Dean had lain. Cas was wild-eyed, panting; his shirt and trousers were filthy with mud, melted snow, and the crimson smears of Dean’s blood.

He barely noticed when Sam guided him away, as discreetly as possible. He followed, without seeing, down the path to Sam and Sarah’s home, Sam guiding him around obstacles in his path so that he wouldn’t trip. Sarah gasped in shock when she saw them, Sam’s haggard face and Castiel’s bloodied clothing and hands. Sam pushed him gently but firmly into a chair and then pulled her aside and murmured in her ear for a moment and Cas didn’t even blink or look up when she cried out.

Much later, Sam was kneeling in front of him, an unreadable look in his eyes. “You’ll stay here,” he said. “Until…” Sam apparently didn’t know how to finish his thought, but that didn’t matter. Castiel was too far away to hear it, anyway.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry.


	9. Chapter 9

A cot, unused since the last time the family had taken a boarder, was set up in the corner of the main living area of Sam’s house. Castiel laid on it at night, staring up at the ceiling, feeling as though some fundamental part of his brain had become disconnected. He was exhausted, but his eyes refused to close; he was weak, but his stomach rebelled at the idea of eating. He couldn’t focus on anything except the memory of Dean’s pale, slack face, the filth on his skin and the blood in his hair. He had no idea what had become of his stained and ruined clothes; Sam had taken them, put Cas in old cast-offs of his own, and he never saw them again. Perhaps they’d been burned.

In the one brief moment in which he was able to find sleep, he found himself back there, holding Dean, hearing voices that told him Dean was gone, dead, lost. He woke shaking and sobbing into his pillow, and he didn’t try to sleep again.

During the day, he was a ghost. Sarah tried to care for him, urging him to eat what he could. “You must never have seen anything like that, being a teacher,” she said, though he wasn’t sure whether she was talking more to him or herself. Her face and voice were rough with weariness; her experience with grief in these types of situations seemed to have strengthened her ability and resolve to persevere. “Sometimes folks go funny that way, with the shock of it, but Dean wouldn’t want it happening on his account. He’ll be right mad if he comes back and finds out you got so spooked that you let yourself starve, so you just eat this soup, you hear?” Cas tried, but it felt impossibly hard.

Little Mary followed him like a shadow, crawling into his lap whenever she could, until Sarah saw her and shooed her away. When he couldn’t do anything but lie on the cot and shake, she perched on the foot of the bed, staring solemnly. It was strangely comforting, in a way; she didn’t seem to mind that he was withdrawn and silent, and her undemanding presence made him feel a little less alone. The rest of the family watched him with worried eyes, whispering about him as though he couldn’t hear.

“It’s a terrible thing, and we all knew he was…sensitive,” Sarah murmured to Sam, biting her lip as she quickly glanced to where Cas was once more sitting in the rocking chair, staring at the floor. “But it’s been days now. Maybe he needs to go see the doc. Seeing all that blood like that might have left him touched in the head. Wouldn’t be the first. Remember Betty Ramsey’s oldest girl, after Roy got caught in that collapse? Poor thing was never the same.”

Sam stayed firm, resisting suggestions that Castiel either be taken to the hospital or brought back to his own house. “Look at him,” he said. “He needs help right now. I don’t know what’s going on in his head, but you know Dean. When he wakes up, he’ll be more worried about how all this affected us than what it did to him, and Cas is like family.” At other times, though, Castiel felt Sam’s eyes on him, narrowed and pensive, as though there was far more that he wasn’t saying.

Sam and Jesse went to work, and Jack stayed home, helping around the house. The school stayed closed, and Cas couldn’t even imagine trying to go back and teach right now. He could barely string two words together, let alone plan lessons. At first, Jack tried to pull his teacher out of his silence, sitting next to him with books and reading quietly aloud; he started with books from school, then moved on to increasingly difficult and powerful books he’d borrowed from Cas’s own library, dog-eared and obviously well-loved. It had little effect, and eventually Sarah, blushing hard over Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” had told Jack to just let him rest.

After work, Sam would catch a ride into the city and visit Dean in the hospital, where he remained unconscious. Sam sat with him, keeping him company and talking with the doctors, but he rarely had any new information to bring home.

“It was a serious fracture, but the x-ray showed that it didn’t, um, rupture the dura? They said that’s a good thing, that he has a much better chance of getting better.”

“His reflexes are all still okay, which they looked pretty happy about.”

“Apparently, the first forty-eight hours are the scariest, but now that it’s past that mark and he’s still…well, his odds are a whole lot better now.”

“I think I might have felt his hand twitch a little. The nurse said that it’s normal for that to happen and doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but, well, you know.”

Castiel couldn’t go see Dean himself. Sam had been adamant about that, insisting that it wouldn’t be good for his own shock. Cas wouldn’t have protested even if he’d had the strength to do it; he thought that the sight of Dean lying ashen in a sterile hospital bed, bandages around his head and needles in his arms, might destroy him fully.

It was on the fourth day after the accident that the last thin threads holding everything together finally snapped.

A knock at the door pulled Castiel’s attention away from yet another replay of the accident. Sarah was at the store, having taken the baby with her, and Jack was…somewhere. Cas didn’t know, hadn’t asked. It was mid-morning, so Sam and Jesse were at the mine, and Cas was alone in the house. The knock came again, and Cas frowned, then pulled himself to his feet, feeling ancient in his bones.

Opening the door, he blinked into the bright sunlight for a moment before his eyes adjusted and he was able to see the bright smile of the mine superintendent. Castiel coughed to clear his throat, and his unused voice creaked a little as he tried to greet the man politely. “I’m afraid Mrs. Winchester is out,” he said, already preparing to close the door.

“Oh, I’m not here to speak to Mrs. Winchester, sweet as she is,” he said, then forestalled Cas’s next words with a raised hand. “And I’m well aware that Mr. Winchester is hard at work as we speak. Do you mind if I come in, though? It’s a mite cold out here, I don’t mind saying.”

Castiel had been living in his fog for too long to try to keep up. He nodded and let the guest move past him and into the house, feeling the first twinges of suspicion that something wasn’t quite right, but he couldn’t wrap his head around why. The boss was looking around the small house with curious eyes, still beaming. “So quaint,” he said, tilting his head at the flower-patterned oil lamp sitting on the shelf. “Just like the little dollhouse my granddaughter plays with. Amazing, isn’t it?” Castiel didn’t see why, but he thought it would sound rude to say so.

“Anyway, I’m actually here to see you, Mr. Novak,” the superintendent said, gesturing toward Cas as he pulled out a chair at the head of the kitchen table and seated himself. Looking around, he muttered, “I don’t suppose there’s any coffee. No, likely not.” Castiel stayed silent, waiting, and the superintendent looked back toward him. “Sit, sit,” he said. “You look halfway to dead, anyway. Now, then…Casteel, isn’t it?”

“Castiel,” Cas corrected. He sat on the far side of the table, feeling uncomfortably exposed by the beady eyes studying him closely.

“Yes, yes, something like that, anyway. I noticed that the school has been closed this week, though there was no scheduled recess.” There was no question there, but the slight edge to his cheerful tone required an explanation.

“I’ve been unwell.”

“Ah, yes, I can see that myself, and I’ve been aware. You know, we’ve actually been concerned for some time.” A shrewd note in his voice hinted at tacit implications, but the superintendent simply steepled his fingers, then, and waited. It seemed Cas was meant to fill in the blanks himself.

“I’m…not sure what you mean by that,” he said slowly. “Have my lessons been insufficient in some respect?”

“Oh, I’m sure those have been fine,” the boss said dismissively. Cas wondered if the company even knew or cared what he was teaching the laborer’s children, so long as he wasn’t using replacing the McGuffey with Marx’s _Manifesto_ and having the children salute the seal of the United Mine Workers of America labor union. “Rather, we—that is to say, I and my colleagues, who have an interest in the moral character, the heart, of this community—we’ve been…well, I won’t say ‘disturbed.’ Troubled? Hmmm.” He looked thoughtfully at the the ceiling, and Castiel grew increasingly irritated. “We all want nothing but the best for the good people living and working here, and make no mistake, when you moved here, you became part of our little flock, Castiel. Your happiness, and your _health_ , became our business.”

Was this an ultimatum? Go to the doctor or be fired? Castiel’s face must have looked truly baffled, because the superintendent leaned forward on his elbows, lowering his brows seriously. “I’m a modern sort of man, and I want you to know that I, personally, am quite sympathetic. I wouldn’t dream of punishing a man for an illness for which he had no hand in the making. And, you know, I’ve heard that there are plenty of your kind who have been completely cured—shock therapy, who knows what. Doctors can do all sorts of things, hear?”

“My kind?” It was that particular phrase, in all the strange rambling, that finally broke through and gave Castiel a chilling insight into the root of this meeting.

“Yes, um…what is it you prefer? Er, sexual inverts? But never mind, I simply wanted to make clear that this is not a punishment. Perhaps you should look at it as…an opportunity. You can’t have been happy here, Castiel. For all that I’m a modern man myself, this is not a place inclined to modern thinking. Coal camps are not places that can easily tolerate deviant behavior, whether the weakness be in the spirit or the body.”

Cas bit his lip, not daring to respond freely until he knew exactly what was out in the open and what was still private, at least for the moment. Finally, he asked in a tight voice, “Am I being dismissed?”

The superintendent leaned back in his chair, resting his hands on his rounded belly. “You’ve seen the coal mine in full production, haven’t you? You know, when the cars are hauled out of the mine, up the hill to the top of the breaker, they dump all those tons of coal out, and it’s not just a pile of black rock. It’s the sweat and blood of hundreds of men who’ve already broken their backs to pull the coal from the rock, stripping out all the impurities they can find that would make the whole load worth less than it should be. And that’s before it even gets to our breaker boys, fine young men who pick and pick over those loads until every last piece of slate or rock is removed. Without all that good work, the coal would be worthless—bone coal. And a mining company…well, it’s just the same. You understand me, son.”

Ah. He was expected to simply leave. The managers didn’t just want him gone, they wanted him to go without a fuss. He’d realized, in the days following his very public breakdown, that word would spread of how he’d behaved, but he’d hoped it would be written off as the emotional weakness of a community outsider, one with a head for books instead of labor. That might be the case for many who’d witnessed or heard about the scene, but if it became known that he was being fired for having been a homosexual, the miners whose children he’d taught might be angry that he’d been brought here in the first place, that he’d been allowed to “taint” their sons and daughters.

His silence, as his thoughts raced, prompted the superintendent to keep ranting. “Of course, the value of a mining company, its true strength, lies in the morale of the whole. A man can pull three or four tons of coal a day, but that’s if everything is going smoothly around him, like clockwork, all the gears turning. Everything meshes together, you see?”

Castiel tilted his head, feigning more confusion. “Are we discussing mining or clockmaking?”

“Well, it’s all the same principle,” the superintendent sighed, annoyance coloring his cheeks a little. “But what I mean to say is that it’s not just for the good of the company’s bottom line that impurities and defects have to be eliminated. It’s much deeper than that. You’ve worked with a schoolroom full of young minds, Castiel. You know that sometimes one must place the needs of the whole higher than anything else.”

_Now I’m an impurity,_ Cas thought with detachment. Perhaps it was the numbness that still lingered over his heart, that hadn’t flagged since he’d risen to his feet from the mud that day. Perhaps it was that he’d been waiting for this moment since he’d stood by the window and watched Daniel trudge away from their school, broken and lost. Whatever the reason, the barbs and personal digs weren’t drawing blood as they might have. He kept a blank, passive expression on his face, letting the man continue to spew mixed metaphors and platitudes that might even have come from a place of sincere belief.

“And everyone’s happier for it, don’t you see?” The superintendent was starting to get frustrated with the lack of response he was receiving. “Those corruptions, if they remain and are allowed to slide past, just fester, causing even more problems in their wake. Gossip runs rampant. Suspicion, discord. Worker turns against his fellow worker, family against family. Why, even good families like the ones living here, under this charming roof, with their children under your tutelage! Even they might find the weight of wrongful judgment falling on them!”

_Wait,_ Cas thought, _was that just an attack on any loyalty I might feel for Sam and Sarah, or was it a veiled warning?_ “They don’t deserve that,” he said, eyes narrowed, equally vague in his response.

“Well, of course, they don’t! The Winchesters…such good, Christian folks. Never had a single word said against them…well, not yet.”

It had definitely been a threat. At some point, all that shifting hyperbole had transitioned into well-disguised aggression, and there was no chance Cas would stand against it. He’d lost, lost everything. Perversely, he thought that this was rather like having a limb amputated while succumbing to a different, deadly, disease; it hurt, but it was difficult to feel much more upset.

He must not have been doing as well at hiding his thoughts anymore, because the superintendent smiled again, a gross parody of sympathy. “It’s probably best to go soon,” he said. “The Winchesters are, indeed, wonderful people, and they’re doing God’s work by helping you through your…illness. But it’s a burden on them, especially with Sam’s brother so gravely injured and in the hospital. Tell me, how is Dean doing?”

“Dean is as well as can be expected.” He knew his voice had turned to stone. There was no way it could have done otherwise.

“I’m glad to hear, then. I know Sam visits him. You haven’t gone yourself, of course, though I’ve heard about how close you two have apparently become.” His predatory smile was the last piece of the puzzle clicking into place. They knew. They knew everything, and if Cas didn’t go, then even when—not “if,” never “if”—Dean recovered, he would suffer. His family, his friends…everything he had would be gone.

Castiel closed his eyes, released a breath, and surrendered.

\---

When Sarah got home from running her errands at the store, having taken the long way home to avoid having to look at Castiel’s blank, haunted eyes for any longer than she had to, she was surprised to find the house empty. The cot in the corner was neatly made, and the stove was cold, the house chilly. Assuming Castiel was finally, happily beginning to recover from his shock, she didn’t worry at all, going about her business preparing bread and pork stew for the family. Jesse arrived home at his usual time after work; he and Jack helped get the meal ready, and then Sarah sent Jack running to Cas’s house to see if he’d like to come by and eat with them, guessing that he’d still need that much, at least. Jack came home alone, nervousness on his face when he said that he’d knocked and knocked, but nobody answered, and that there’d been no light in the windows or smoke from the chimney.

Sam came back home late, having gone on to the hospital again after work, and he was immediately much more apprehensive about Castiel’s abrupt disappearance than Sarah had been.

“He’s probably just asleep in his own bed,” she insisted, shaking her head in bewildered confusion. “God knows he hasn’t been getting any good sleep here. He probably slept through the knocking.”

“I just want to check on him,” Sam said, kissing her cheek as he disappeared through the door into the night.

He, too, came back alone, though. “He’s gone,” Sam said, looking grim, eyes hard. “His clothes, his books…there was a train going north this afternoon, and my guess is that he was probably on it. Looked like he threw everything into his trunk and left as fast as he could.”

“But why?” Sarah asked. “His family? I know he said they weren’t close, but maybe he was just brought low enough to want to try and mend fences?” She never would have imagined such a thing happening, from the way Castiel had talked about them on the few occasions he’d done so, but maybe he’d been stunned into a change of heart.

“Hmmm,” Sam said, but he refused to talk about it any more that night, simply staring at the flame of the oil lamp in silent contemplation.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, really. I truly am sorry.


	10. Chapter 10

Cold. Everything was cold, but not in a bone-deep painful way. It was a constant, controlled sort of chill, broken only by the occasional feel of localized warmth somewhere close by; he would want to move toward it, to strain for it, but he didn’t know how. It was there, and he was here, and distant awareness was all he had, along with a need that never quite translated into action.

There were sometimes noises, a muffled hum of activity, as though he was hearing it from underwater. It caught his attention only because it was something different, drifting as he was in the coldness. When he tried too hard to turn the hum into intelligible words or voices, pain split him in two, shattering the crystal bubble in which he floated and sending the shards of glass through his head. The sounds would get louder, when that happened, and he was afraid, but then something would change and he would find himself falling again into darkness, quieter than before.

There were no days or nights, no clear marking even of when he slept or woke. It was all the same, awareness and oblivion dovetailing into each other and becoming one woven cloth, and he dreamed of climbing it, wrapping it around himself, using it to warm himself from the cold that held him, blanketing him and making him shiver without actually moving. Was this the way it had always been? Had he ever known anything else? He thought there was something he was forgetting, some reason he needed to escape from the numbing darkness, but the pain always made him afraid to follow that thought too far.

A smell. Had there been a smell before? He couldn’t recall, but there was a definite smell now, inescapable. It was sharp, slightly burning in his nose, and he wanted to shy away from it, but that was impossible. He couldn’t move, and the smell seemed to be everywhere, anyway. Moonshine? No, it was thinner than that, a sort of low-level permeation, like someone had spilled a drink and cleaned it up, but the scent of alcohol was lingering in the air. His nostrils flared, twitching.

The quiet buzz grew a little louder. It would start to hurt soon. He was afraid of it, and he felt a rising urge to get away, to escape. Cringing, he fought through the weight of the darkness, searching for a way out. Another sound, a low groaning, reached his ears, and he was surprised to recognize it as his own voice.

Now the buzz was no longer quiet at all. A harsh noise, loud and terrifying, was quickly stopped, replaced by other sounds that seemed no less urgent. Yes, there was pain, but he found himself compelled to respond to the noises that he understood were calling to him, demanding his response. Did they know he was hiding here in the dark, but aware? He didn’t understand anything that was happening, but somehow he knew that voice, and he knew he’d obey what it asked of him if there was any possibility of doing it. He struggled again, trying to repeat the noise he’d made before.

Tightness, something gripping his hand. He had a hand! How had he forgotten what it was to have hands, and arms, and a body to which they were connected? The crystal bubble was breaking again, and between the piercing pains his consciousness rose, stronger than his wish to escape the hurt. Focusing on the tightness surrounding his hand, he forced his weakened muscles to return the squeeze. Outside his bubble, chaos seemed to erupt.

More gripping, more noise, and now there was something touching his face, gently prodding around his eyes. He flinched, trying to move away, and then a bright light burst upon him. “Ugh, stop,” he croaked. “Hurts.”

“Oh, my God, Dean!” The voice, the one that he’d followed out of the drifting fog, was laughing, and it was sobbing, too. Dean blinked in the direction from where it was coming, twisting his head so that the beam of bright light being pointed into his eyes had to chase him. It hurt when he moved it, though, and he quickly stopped.

“What the hell…” Dean’s voice was so crackly, his mouth so dry, that he paused, trying to swallow and work some moisture back into his tongue. “What the hell happened?” he said on his second try. His eyes were still having trouble focusing, even when the bright light was removed. Almost everything was in shades of white or grey, except for the large shadow moving beside him. When he winced again as he tried to turn toward the shadow, it shifted around, moving in front of him. For some reason, that helped a good deal; while everything in his peripheral vision was ridiculously blurry, he could almost make sense of things that were directly ahead of him. “Sam?” he rasped.

“Dean, I can’t believe…I was so scared! You scared the hell out of all of us!” A double set of hands lifted, wiping tears from the cheeks of two faces. Dean frowned and squinted, trying to make the double-vision pass. “Don’t you remember any of what happened?”

“That’s not unusual,” another voice, brisk and accented from the north, said. The speaker was somewhere far off to Dean’s side, so he didn’t have a prayer of seeing him. “With cranial injuries, memory loss is common, though it may return with time.”

“I’m in the hospital,” Dean said, though that much was becoming obvious. “I…hit my head?” The rescue training only went so far in helping him get a grasp on what was happening here, especially with everything so blurry and confusing.

“There was an accident at the mine,” Sam said, and Dean choked as flickers of memory started teasing at him. The smell of sulfur, the dizzying nausea, the anger, the terror. Garth, boneless on his shoulder. “My guys,” he gasped. His head was starting to throb in a truly painful way, and he felt the doctor moving at his shoulder, reaching for his wrist. “Garth! Is he all right? Did they get him out?”

Sam’s eyes were wide, and he used his other hand to double his grip on Dean’s hand. “Dean, slow down. Garth is fine. Well, he’s got an ankle broken in a couple different places, but they got it set, and he should heal okay. Victor’s already back at work, and Benny will be back soon. They think he breathed more of the stinkdamp, but the cough’s almost gone now. Everyone’s just worried about you, since you were the one to take a falling support pillar to the skull.”

Dean swallowed. He felt weaker than he could logically explain away. “How long…?”

“Almost two weeks.” Another laughing sob shook Sam momentarily, and he covered his mouth. “Was beginning to wonder…well, I told myself not to give up hoping, but you sure did make it hard.”

The deep lines Dean could make out on Sam’s face testified to the truth of that. The shadows along his jaw appeared to be well past what could be termed stubble, firmly in beard territory, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His brother had been grieving, and Dean’s heart ached for him. Then his breath caught as he realized there was someone else who would be just as devastated, if not more so. “Is Cas here? Did he come?”

Sam shifted a little. Dean still couldn’t see his face very clearly, definitely not enough to read subtle changes in expression, but he thought his brother looked uncomfortable for a moment. Before either of them could say anything else, though, the doctor who’d been holding Dean’s wrist put it down. “Pulse is elevated, and his breathing is fast. I’d imagine it’s the high emotions as much as the pain, but I’d like my patient to rest now. He still has a long road to recovery.”

“How long will he have to stay here?” Sam asked the doctor, and Dean was distracted from their earlier topic, equally interested in hearing the answer.

“It’s difficult to say,” the doctor said. “Head injuries are as unique as the men who receive them. It’s an extremely good sign that he’s awake and remembering, as well as able to speak and to see. We’ll watch for issues as they arise and treat them as they do, but…it’s still early to say. And some issues may even arise years in the future, though of course he won’t be hospitalized for that long.”

Sam chuckled uneasily. Dean knew the reason for that. Hospitals were incredibly expensive, and it wasn’t as though there was a lot of money lying around to pay for long stays. Sometimes it couldn’t be helped, but if there was any wiggle room, Dean knew he’d be arguing to do his healing at home.

The days following Dean’s awakening seemed to crawl by. Sam obviously could only visit for an hour or two a day, especially if he wanted to work extra hours to help Dean with his medical bills. Dean’s pride chafed at that, but there was no way he could afford to turn down the help, so he did his sulking in private. And privacy he had, of a sorts; there were plenty of doctors and nurses around, but they were only interested in his mood so far as it related to his symptoms. As it happened, his being grouchy over constant headaches, muscle weakness and trembling, and persistent blurriness in his vision didn’t fall in the realm of a medical issue.

He missed Castiel, too. Once Sam had gone home that first night, Dean realized his misstep in asking about Cas. Why would the town schoolteacher, even if he was a friend, have been waiting by his bedside while he laid there unconscious? Cas was smarter than that; he’d definitely have known better than to put them both at risk, just so he could hold the hand of a man who’d never know he was there. Maybe he’d come visit now, with Dean awake. That wouldn’t look too strange, Dean thought. Friends visit each other in the hospital all the time.

But he didn’t come. Sam just shook his head and changed the subject when Dean asked, which was aggravating, because if Dean had to keep trying to repeat the question about where Castiel was and why he wasn’t coming, people would notice. It was hard enough to have normal conversations, because Sam kept peppering the doctors for information about the healing process. Since the primary concern for most of his stay had been his refusal to wake, now that he had finally done so, his doctors hadn’t delayed in getting him out of bed and onto his feet. It was a discouraging process; Dean repeatedly stumbled and nearly fell, his left leg weaker than the right. The nurses gave him a cane, and he would have been happy to use it, even if it did make him look like an old man, but his hand wouldn’t stop trembling, making the thing shake and slip on the floor.

“It’ll take practice,” the nurse told Sam when she described how it had gone. Dean scowled, closing his eyes and imagining he had Cas there to hold him and tell him that, yes, it was going to be all right, but that it was okay to be pissed for now. Cas would understand, if he were here. Dean eventually pretended he was asleep, and Sam left quietly after that.

Four days later, against the advice of the doctors, Dean managed to walk out of the hospital on his own feet. The cane trembled, and Sam hovered by his other side, ready to catch him if he needed it. His head ached, but it had become manageable, and he wore darkened glasses against the glare of the sun. There wasn’t really any more that they hospital could do for him that they couldn’t do at home, so home he was going. Well, to Sam’s home. Sam had been unmovable on that point.

Sam had arranged for a friend to give them both a ride back to the coal town, and once Dean was settled into the backseat of the car, he found himself drifting off to sleep almost immediately. He supposed his body had grown accustomed to being unconscious; better that than to think that this constant exhaustion was going to be his new normal. It didn’t matter at the moment, though, so he let his mind fall away and slept the entire ride home.

He roused at the feeling of Sam gently shaking his arm. “C’mon, Dean,” Sam urged fondly. “You can go back to sleep in a real bed just as soon as you get inside.” Dean let Sam pull him from the car and support almost all his weight as they staggered inside. He collapsed onto the cot in the corner, all made up with soft quilts, and was out again the moment his head hit the pillow.

Waking to the smell of cooking meat was much nicer than the smell of antiseptic, and Dean actually felt much more rested than he had in days. There was soft murmuring around him, and he let it float past, his eyes still closed, as he enjoyed the comforts of being home again. He had no idea what time it was; was that supper he smelled, or had he slept through the night, making that the smell of leftovers?

When he finally cracked his eyes, he found no clear answer. Sarah was feeding baby Mary at the table, and Jack was sitting beside her, reading from a thick book. Sam and Jesse weren’t in evidence, though it was possible he just couldn’t see them. If they were at work, but Jack was home, then what time of day was it? The dim grey light filtering through the curtains wasn’t helpful.

He rolled over to push himself into a seated position, catching the attention of his family members. Jack immediately jumped out of his chair and rushed to help Dean, who waved him away. “Not some broken-down old man, just because of the cane,” he grumbled teasingly. “Been sitting by myself for a long time now. So where is everybody?”

“Work, just like usual,” Sarah said with a smile. “We couldn’t wake you to eat last night, though we didn’t try real hard. You needed that sleep. But I’m sure you’re hungry now, so I’ll dish you up some hominy grits if you want. There’s some bacon, too.”

He nodded gratefully, then tilted his head at Jack. “If it’s a work day, then how come you’re playing hooky from school? You better not tell me you stayed home because of me. I don’t need you putting your schooling aside just to hold my spoon or walk me to the outhouse.”

“School’s closed,” Jack said, frowning. Before Dean could turn his head and attempt to make out whether there was a blizzard happening outside, Jack added, “It’s been closed since Mr. Novak left.”

“What?” Dean was sure he’d misunderstood. He turned to look for Sarah, room blurring a little as his head moved. “What’s he talking about?”

“Oh, it’s a shame,” Sarah clucked. “And, Dean, I know you well enough by now to know you’re liable to take it personal and feel guilty, but I don’t want you doing that, hear? Castiel just took a real bad turn when he saw you get hurt, and he went a little funny after that. We tried to help him—took him in, made him rest. He just…well, the poor man couldn’t handle it, and he took off. Went back to his family, I guess.”

Dean’s heart pounded in his chest. “I don’t understand. How did he…when did he see me get hurt?” The story didn’t make one bit of sense, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t just his brain having trouble processing it.

“You know, I don’t understand that myself,” Sarah said. “I don’t know why he was at the mine and not in school. Jack said he was sick, but then he came home with Sam, and his whole shirt front was…” She gestured uncomfortably at her own chest, miming a mess with her fingers and expression. “I guess he was trying to help get you out, maybe? Sam doesn’t really like to talk about that day, not that I blame him, and Castiel didn’t really talk at all after that.”

Dean stared from Jack to Sarah and back again, waiting for something to untangle the confusion. Cas was in school, and he’d been in the mine. Then he was injured, and Cas was there, getting covered in his blood and…what? “He wouldn’t go home,” Dean tried. That much, at least, he was sure about.

“I might have thought that, too, but I reckon you just can’t know what a person will do,” Sarah shrugged. “They do say blood’s thicker than water, and he looked so lost. It was probably too much for him, if he’d never seen a mine accident before.”

Dean didn’t have the strength to argue, even though he knew she was wrong. Cas hadn’t left, and he certainly hadn’t gone back to a family that didn’t want him around. “He wouldn’t go,” Dean repeated quietly, lying back down and closing his eyes. The plate of grits sat on the table and got cold.

When Sam got home, Dean immediately shoved himself to his feet and reached for his cane. “Need to talk to you,” he grunted, limping across the floor. Sam started to protest, but he saw the look on Dean’s face and understood. He turned and pulled the door open, letting Dean through to the outside before following.

“Where’s Cas?” Dean asked in a firm voice the moment the door closed behind them.

Sam didn’t bother trying to soften the blow. “Gone. Probably back north, but no way to know for sure.”

Dean swore a vile oath, strong enough to make even Sam’s eyebrows lift. “Why? What happened? Why would he just—”

“Dean, you didn’t see him. He was there when they pulled you out of that mine, and he just _broke_. He was down in the mud, crying and begging. If I hadn’t pulled him away, I think he’d have said something that would have told the whole company the truth of things, he was so far out of his mind.”

He could just picture it, and he thought he might start crying himself if he didn’t stop thinking about it. “All the more reason why he wouldn’t have just vanished. If he was so worried, why would he leave before he knew how I was? Why would he leave if I was hurt as bad as I was? Sam, he wouldn’t. That’s not the man he is! I _know_ him!”

Sam shook his head, saying, “Dean, you’re not getting it. I have no idea what he was thinking after that, because he just _snapped._ I think he might have just cracked, somewhere inside. That man who I brought home didn’t even look like Cas anymore. And maybe you knew him and maybe you didn’t, because no matter what you think you know, his house is empty. He’s gone. And I’m pretty sure he’s not coming back.”

Dean felt every word like a knife. The only thing keeping him from dropping to his knees was an image of Castiel’s face, smiling at him, telling him he’d always love him. “Something’s not right here,” he said, voice cracking.

“Just one thing?” Sam laughed humorlessly.

“Shut up.” Dean ran a shaking hand over his face, staring at the ground. “Did he say anything? Leave a note?”

Sam shook his head. “I didn’t see one. Honestly, I think he left so suddenly that he didn’t have time. You should see the mess he left of his house.”

Tilting his chin back up a fraction and biting back an angry remark when he saw the pity in Sam’s sorrowful eyes, Dean paused for a heartbeat, feeling something stir in his head. _You know, I think I might need to._

\---

It was a couple of days after that before Dean had developed a reasonable level of confidence in his ability to maneuver about safely with the cane. He waited until Sam and Jesse had gone to work and Sarah had stepped out to visit a neighbor, and then he informed Jack that he was getting cabin fever and needed to get outside for a bit.

“I can go with you, Uncle Dean,” his nephew offered, every bit his father’s son. Dean bit his lip and tried not to smirk at the closeness, and at how he hoped that his usual tactics for lying to one would translate equally well into lying to the other.

“No, your mama set you to sweeping the floor,” he scolded, lifting an eyebrow in chastisement. “Don’t try to use me to get out of your chores, boy.”

Jack protested that he was doing no such thing, and a little guilt rose in Dean’s gut; he knew Jack hadn’t been trying to shirk, that he was honestly trying to be thoughtful with his offer. Even so, he needed Jack to stay home, and there was little chance the boy would have let him go off on his own if he hadn’t had a good reason. He patted Jack’s shoulder, nodded at his excuses, and got the hell out as fast as he could, before another obstacle could arise.

The quarter-mile or so between Sam’s house and Castiel’s would have taken only a few minutes to cross before Dean had been injured. With the weak leg, the blurry eyesight that got worse in the bright sunlight, and the tiredness that gripped him when he exerted himself, it seemed to take hours, and by the time he pulled open the door that had been left unlocked, Dean needed to drop into a chair and breathe deeply for a bit. The place was still unoccupied, of course, as he’d expected; with no new teacher and Sam’s confirmation that no recent workers had been hired, the only possibility for new residents were of the whiskered and squeaking variety.

Sam had been correct in at least two respects. Cas was clearly gone, at least from the house, and he had cleared out in a big hurry. The bookshelves and kitchen had been emptied carefully, but small items still littered the floor and table surfaces. One of the teacups that Cas had inherited from his mother sat on the kitchen table, sticky and stained brown with the unwashed dregs of a hastily finished drink. Dean traced a finger over it, trying to imagine what had to have been going through Cas’s mind to make him leave it behind.

_He was broken_ , Sam had said. Dean closed his eyes, forcing himself to try to see it. He tried to imagine himself in a similar circumstance. Cas lying still in his arms, crushed and bleeding; Cas pulled from his arms and taken away, leaving him bereft and alone. What might that have done to him, in Castiel’s shoes? Try as he might, his eyes finally flooding and overflowing with the tears he’d been holding back from the moment he’d been told Cas had disappeared, he couldn’t make himself accept that he would ever willingly walk away. Not only that, he couldn’t believe that Cas would, either.

_Not even a note._ But that wasn’t exactly true. Castiel’s evident haste was a sort of note, telling Dean about his emotional state when he’d run away. A Castiel that had been sorrowful but resolved would have taken the time to pack carefully, believing that he was justified in leaving, that either there was no reason to stay or that the reasons to go were stronger. If Cas had been in the sort of mental shock Sarah and Sam had described, he might not have packed at all, or perhaps only the few things he really thought he needed. But this…

Dean stood up, slowly navigating around the house and taking stock of what had been left. A notepad and pencil on the floor by the bed, partially hidden by a bedsheet that dangled and dragged as though it had been ripped free when the quilt and blanket had been torn free. Most of the plates and silverware were gone, but one set remained in the dishpan, waiting to be cleaned. A pair of socks and a folded handkerchief hid on the closet shelf, tucked to the back where they were barely visible. Dean’s poor eyes struggled to see every clue, and it occurred to him that the items that had been left were things that would have been just as difficult to see through a blur of tears.

Castiel had not wanted to go. Why had he?

The exhaustion returned, wrapped in a wave of heartbreak, and Dean dropped onto the empty bed. Maybe Cas had just given up, thinking that Dean was as good as dead. That hurt, because Dean knew in his gut that if the situation were reversed, he’d never have been convinced to give up hope, not unless they were lowering Cas into the ground. “You never even said goodbye,” he whispered. “You didn’t even give me that much.” No hospital visit, no letter, no final message to be passed on just in case of a miracle. Maybe what Dean thought they had together, in the end, hadn’t been worth as much to Cas as it was to him.

He was truly crying now, and he didn’t bother to wipe away the tears. There was nobody to see them, anyway. Dean was alone, all alone in the place he and Castiel had made safe for themselves. This had been their haven, their shelter from everything outside, the only place they could escape from the outside world. Well, he’d escaped for the last time, and he’d be damned if he wouldn’t let himself take advantage.

Flopping onto his back and blinking, his eye caught another item left behind in Castiel’s hasty exodus. A white-framed watercolor painting on the wall nearly blended into the painted wood behind it, and a memory flitted through Dean’s mind when he noticed it. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes with his sleeve, trying to pull the picture into focus. It was a simple landscape painting, a run-down little house, shrubs creeping up the outside, set against the backdrop of a grey, restless sea. In the distance, a lighthouse glowed dimly.

A half-remembered conversation, a shared confession. _“I visited the shore once, as a child, and the image stayed with me—the idea of being far from judgment, from all the watching, weighing eyes.”_ If Castiel had left broken and without hope, he wouldn’t have gone back to a loveless family for solace. He’d have fled to find it on his own. Dean was sure of it.

New resolve filling him, Dean swallowed his last sobs and got up, pushing off with his cane toward the door. Castiel might have given up on Dean, and if that were true, then Dean would find some way to accept it; he wouldn’t fight for something that wasn’t there anymore. But he wasn’t going to accept this, being left with no explanation, no closure. If Cas was finished with him, then he needed to tell him so, and there was no way Dean was going to stop pushing until he’d found a way to get at least that much.

\---

“Mr. Winchester! What a lovely surprise to see you up and on your feet again!” The mining company superintendent leaned back in his chair, dropping his papers onto the desk and folding his hands across his stomach. “All of us here were really pulling for you. But you’re a hardy sort, aren’t you! Take a lot more than a small mishap to put you out of commission, wouldn’t it?”

Dean managed a small smile, while the other man laughed, in the name of civility. He wasn’t at all surprised that the company would try to welcome him back in a friendly way while simultaneously minimizing the accident that had nearly killed him. To them, the best possible outcome from what happened would have probably been his death; after all, if he had died, the investigation could have pinned all the blame on him, and nobody whose opinion carried weight would have disagreed. Since he hadn’t done them the courtesy of dying, they needed him to play nice, not point fingers, and help them make it all go away, at least until the state investigators stopped looking.

“Now, you’re not ready to go back to work yet, are you?” The superintendent cast a look at the cane in Dean’s hand, shaking under his white-knuckled grip. “I can appreciate the spirit, but—”

“No, that’s not why I’m here,” Dean broke in. His interruption made his boss’s brows lift, but he was really too wiped to care much about that. “I just needed some information from the employee files, thought your clerk might be able to get it for me. Seems like he’s not around, though, and I didn’t much care to wait, with my leg troubling me.” _Two can play at this game,_ he decided, sensing the tension in the room rise when the superintendent glanced down toward the limb in question.

“Well, I’d be happy to help if I can, though those files can be a mystery to me sometimes,” the superintendent said with a wink. “What sort of information did you need? Something for one of your crew?”

“Actually, I need the address of the next of kin for Mr. Novak, the former schoolteacher.” This time, the other man’s reaction wasn’t so subtle; the superintendent’s smile froze, and he blinked. Dean filed the response away for the moment, continuing on. “See, he loaned my brother’s boys some books and things, and he left so quickly that they didn’t have a chance to return them. I’d like to send them on if I could. Books can be expensive.”

“Well, isn’t that a shame,” the superintendent said. “You know, though, I’m sure he must have remembered about them. As you say, books are pricey. Why, I bet he left them on purpose. Didn’t he come to care for those young men? He probably meant for them to keep them, as a sort of parting gift.”

_He’s lying._ Dean had no idea why he’d be given a lie, but he was definitely going to find out. “Mmm, I don’t think so, sir. One of those books is an actual first edition, sir, and it was inscribed by some professor or other to him by name. He wouldn’t have left that intentionally.”

“Hmm.” That fake smile was looking more brittle by the second. A little more, and Dean would have him. “Maybe he had an extra copy. Who knows, he might not even have liked the man who signed it.”

“Well, you know me,” Dean said with an easy shrug. “I’m not one to presume. I like to make sure loose ends get tied up, all the boxes checked. No questions left unanswered.” _Tell me what you’re not saying._

The superintendent dropped the fake smile, looking slightly exasperated. “Have you considered that Mr. Novak would prefer not to be reminded of his time here? You must know that he didn’t leave here under the best of circumstances. Quick cuts heal the cleanest, Mr. Winchester, and that goes for everyone on both sides of the equation. Let the boys keep the books. It’s time for us all to move on past the unpleasantness of recent events.”

The longer the man talked, the more suspicious Dean grew. His head had begun to ache, and the part of his heart that had refused to accept that Cas would ever choose to walk away voluntarily had started to scream that whatever the real reason was, Dean could find it in the unspoken messages behind these lies and excuses. “So we’re all just supposed to pretend he was never here? Just forget all about him?” He realized that he no longer sounded like a man wanting to pack up left-behind belongings for a casual acquaintance, but he no longer gave a shit. He was done pretending.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual. “What needed to be done was done, Winchester,” the superintendent said in disgust, glaring sharply. “And that’s all that needs to be said on the matter. Truth be told, you should be thanking me.” Already sending signals of dismissal, he leaned forward to pick up his papers once more, turning his eyes back toward the print. “Any man can lose his mind and make poor decisions, and some of those decisions destroy lives. Count yourself fortunate that yours didn’t, this time.”

At the end of his patience, head now throbbing badly, Dean slammed his free hand onto the top of the desk. He loomed over it as threateningly as he could, praying his leg wouldn’t choose to collapse under him now. “You think lives haven’t been ruined by bad choices here? Because of your foreman, I’m barely walking. Because of your company’s policies, I can’t see for shit unless it’s right in front of my goddamn face, and the doctors can’t tell me if that’s ever going to get any better. And because of ‘good men’ like you, an _actual_ good man, one of the best I’ve ever had the privilege to know, is out there on his own somewhere, hurting, thinking he’s lost everything. And you are going to tell me where he went, or point me at somebody who knows, or else I’m going to go find the nearest safety inspector and tell him every last goddamn thing I know.”

Dean was breathing hard when he finished, hoping like hell that he sounded more confident than he felt. Inside, he was shaking. If the superintendent called his bluff, Dean might manage to do some major damage on his way out, but any victory would come at a high cost. The whole world would end up learning that he’d been having an affair with another man, and when the criminal actions of the mine management started becoming public, the whole scandal would probably end up in half the papers in the state.

They stared at each other, eyes narrowed angrily, for a long moment, assessing. At last, the superintendent’s lip curled into a sneer. “I’ll give you the address I have,” he said, “but you’ll take it and go. You’re no more use here, anyway. The company will make sure the doctors get their share, and you just go. And if you think you can scurry away and then open your mouth…”

“They won’t hear anything from me.” _Though if you think Sam hasn’t already begun thinking about talking, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought._ “Quick cuts heal cleanest.” Dean held out his hand, and the superintendent huffed, turning away from it to unlock the large wooden file cabinet in the corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: in 1899, West Virginia passed legislation requiring hospitals to be built specifically for workers in "dangerous occupations." The result was Miners Hospitals No. One, Two, and Three. Two and Three closed midway through the twentieth century, but Miners Hospital No. One is still around, only now it's called Welch Community Hospital.


	11. Chapter 11

Tender green blades of new grass were beginning to take over the stretches of brown that had lined the road to Castiel’s cottage. He noted the change distractedly, mind still working through the events of the school day. Castiel honestly hadn’t expected to find another teaching job so quickly, particularly without any sort of references from his previous employers. Through sheer coincidence, he’d managed to stumble upon a community that had just the right blend of disregard for other people’s opinions and a need for someone that would respect theirs. Teaching at a Quaker school wasn’t actually all that different, he’d come to find. No reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance, naturally, but the alphabet was still the alphabet, and sums were always sums.

Castiel liked the quiet. Not everyone in the tiny community was part of the Quaker faith, but they were prevalent enough that the attitude of peace and contemplative “centering down” seemed to permeate. The school board hadn’t asked many personal questions at all, apparently willing to let his academic training speak for itself, which was refreshing; the parents of his students seemed similarly inclined to simply live and let live. Cas appreciated that respect, even if he still didn’t fully trust it. The Friends were supposedly quite liberal in their thinking, and he even had his suspicions that the two widowed ladies sharing the cottage nearest to his own, just on the other side of the rise, were actually more than just friends, but that was not his business. That lesson had left a deep scar in the learning.

He had the privacy he’d dreamed of having, and he even had his little cottage with the view of the endless waves rolling in. The Chesapeake Bay wasn’t quite the sea, but it was close enough. He could sit on his porch by himself, hearing nothing but the gulls and the other sounds of the shore, and nothing would disturb his concentration, whether he was writing, reading, or just meditating. He was free, but he was so full of sadness and regret that it was impossible to find much joy in it. Losing the connection with Dean, having that love ripped from him, was still so painful that he couldn’t imagine trying to connect with any of his new neighbors, no matter how terribly lonely he grew. None of them pushed, as though they understood. One elderly woman had gifted him a tiny black cat as a welcome present. Cas had named her Minnaloushe, and she had become his best, and only real, friend.

He wondered whether Dean had ever woken. More than anything, he hoped that he had, but he also ached at what that would mean, what Dean might think about why he had left. He would have been completely devastated if Dean had left him, especially in the way he had done, but he knew that Dean never would have done that. Dean probably hated him now, if he lived and had recovered.

_He would have wanted me to stay. He would have insisted, would have fought the world for me, for_ us. _But it would have destroyed him in the end, and he’d have ended up hating me anyway. He’d have resented me for everything he lost._ This way, at least, Castiel prayed that Dean could at least go back to the life he’d had before Cas had come into his world and turned it upside-down.

He wished he could apologize, that he could have explained. The poetry he wrote, sitting on the porch and looking out at the water, was maudlin and cloying, frequently addressed to an unidentified “my love.” They were terrible poems, and he would never be able to show them to anyone. Cas kept writing them anyway.

At other times, he worked on repairing the cottage, using all the skills Dean had taught him. The salt and humidity in the air meant that much of the wood needed to be repaired, and the work was satisfying, if bittersweet. Now that spring was really settling in, he thought he might turn his eye toward the stretch of land that ran behind his house, overlooking the beach; he didn’t know what would grow there, but he could learn.

Cas sighed, turning his feet from the dirt lane and crossing through the split-rail fence in front of his yard. He had been gazing at the ground for most of his walk, and he finally lifted his head to call out to Minna. His mouth hung open, soundless, when he saw a figure sitting on his porch. He squinted, then blinked a few times, rubbing his temple; if he was imagining what he thought he saw, well, it wouldn’t have been the first time. The person sitting on the steps remained stubbornly visible. _A neighbor,_ Cas thought. _One with an uncanny resemblance._

The man stood, then, walking toward him with halting steps and leaning on a cane. With each step closer, Castiel felt more and more lost, helpless and unable to think. Those beautiful green eyes that had sparkled up at him in the light of the bedside lamp—darkened spectacles obscured some of the color now, but they could never hide the warmth in them. He might have been a bit more pale, and he’d definitely lost weight, but the smile on his face could have lit a moonless night.

As in many moments where his own words failed him, Castiel found himself once again falling back upon the words of the poems he loved, always so much better at expressing the heart of what he felt. “‘It comes to me as of a dream,’” he whispered, lifting a hand between them and then pulling back, suddenly afraid of ruining the illusion. “‘I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you.’”

“Well, if this was a dream, my feet would probably ache a lot less,” Dean said. “Not to mention my ass, from riding in the back of that last truck. God forbid I ever have to hitch another ride across the mountains, but if I do, you can bet I’m going to layer on every pair of trousers I own first.” His grin was cocky, just as sunny as Castiel remembered, just as he saw it every night in his dreams.

“Oh, my God,” he said in a choking voice. His arms fluttered at his sides; the bag of books and papers that had hung from his shoulder fell to the ground, unnoticed. He stepped forward, driven by a the urge to grab Dean and never let go, but a sudden surge of terror and remorse filled him before he could reach out. The blood drained from his face, and his muscles trembled. “Oh, my God,” he repeated, words cracking and shaky.

Dean’s smile slipped, and his eyes were unbearably tender. “Not a ghost, either, Cas.” He didn’t hold back another moment, moving in close and pulling him into his arms, holding him tight against his chest. Nestled in the warmth of Dean’s embrace, Castiel shattered, sobbing heartbroken tears that soaked into the flannel of his travel-dusty shirt.

“I lost you, I _lost_ you,”Cas repeated, over and over, struggling to believe that this was more than a delusion marking the final snapping of his sanity. But the familiar scent of Dean’s body, and the way Dean’s hands traced shapes along his back and shoulder blades just the way they had all those nights as they laid together…his imagination could never be this perfect or this cruel.

“You didn’t lose me, and you never could,” Dean murmured into his hair. “Would take a lot more than that to lose me.” Castiel cried harder, burrowing even closer.

Eventually they stumbled their way inside the cottage. Castiel felt completely drained, but Dean’s cane and limp kept him from being able to help support Cas’s weight. Instead, they leaned against each other, arms tightly around waists, giggling in a slightly hysterical way every time they wobbled. Neither of them seemed willing to pull apart from the other. Most of the living space in the tiny cottage was visible from the front door, and a few more staggering steps allowed them to reach a deep, cushioned bench sitting under the largest window. They both gratefully sagged onto it, nearly collapsing into each other.

Still overcome with emotion, Cas reached for Dean’s hands, wrapping them in his own. There was an unmistakable tremor in Dean’s left hand, and Cas’s heart ached anew, remembering the horrible event that caused it. “Oh, Dean, I was so scared. Your head…I saw…”

Dean lifted Cas’s hands to his lips, kissing his knuckles. Trembling, Cas freed one hand and slowly pushed his fingers into Dean’s hair, moving them back around his head until they could trace the long scar running along his scalp. He shuddered hard, recalling the sight of the blood on his hand, and Dean bent his forehead to rest against his.

“I’m okay now,” he said firmly. “Might have taken me a bit to get here, and some of the souvenirs could be permanent. The cane, the scar, maybe the headaches. At least I’m seeing a little better now. For a while, there, my eyes thought everybody was twins, but now I just have trouble in bright light and right around the edges. But I made it all the way here on my own, which is pretty impressive, right?” He winked, and Castiel had to laugh. Then Dean sighed and frowned a little. “The worst part wasn’t the injury. It was not knowing where you’d gone or why.”

“Dean, I’m so sorry…” Cas felt the tears begin to rise in his throat again, and Dean quickly hugged him tight.

“No, don’t. I figured it all out in the end, and I’ve got you now. No more crying.” He stroked Castiel’s hair, comforting him until he could breathe again.

“When you were…” Cas swallowed, not able to get the words out without crying again. “I couldn’t think about anything but what would happen if you didn’t wake up. I was terrified. But then when they told me I had to leave, it was like they took away even that small hope. I managed to ruin everything. Even if you woke up in completely perfect health, we weren’t ever going to be allowed to have what we had before. They told me…they said…”

“Yeah, I know what they said,” Dean finished. His jaw was clenched, and his brow furrowed; Cas felt his fingers tighten in his hair for a moment. “I am so, so sorry that you had to go through that.”

Castiel sniffled, shaking his head. “Dean, you were the one who was almost killed.”

“Well, I slept through most of it,” Dean joked, trying to lighten the mood. Cas rolled his eyes and gently shoved at his shoulder, and Dean laughed. “Like I said, it hurt a hell of a lot more when I thought I’d lost you, too. Which was _not your fault,_ ” he added when Cas opened his mouth to apologize again.

“But wait. How did you find me?” Castiel suddenly wondered. He hadn’t exactly left a forwarding address.

“Ah. Well, I’m actually pretty proud of that,” Dean said. “Your brother Gabriel gave you away; I got his address from the superintendent, and I’ll tell you _that_ story later, because it’s a good one. Anyway, Gabriel took some convincing, but he got me in the neighborhood, since you’d written to him that you found work with ‘a community of Quakers in Maryland.’ By the way, do you have any idea how many little Quaker settlements there are around these parts?” He held up his hands in exasperation. “I must have visited a dozen before I stumbled on the one where the ladies at the post office told me about the handsome new schoolteacher they’d brought in.” Castiel flushed, ducking his head and smiling. Dean tucked a finger under his chin, lifting it back up and smiling at him. “You know, I thought the same thing the first time I saw you.”

“Flatterer,” Cas said, noting how Dean’s eyes dropped to his lips as he spoke. Self-conscious for a moment, he absently licked at them, and the darkening of Dean’s eyes was the only warning he got before he was being very thoroughly kissed. He gasped in surprise, opening his lips under the assault, and Dean was quick to take advantage, pressing deeper and using his tongue to reclaim and utterly consume. Castiel heard himself whimper, and he wasn’t even a little embarrassed.

Breathless, they finally separated, running hands along each other’s jawlines and cheekbones. “Needed that,” Dean sighed.

“You weren’t the only one,” Cas agreed. They grinned at each other stupidly, and Cas felt himself sinking into Dean’s gaze. The moment was only broken when Dean’s eyes suddenly popped wide open and he yelped and jumped. Castiel pulled back, startled, and looked down to see the cat, curling her body and tail around Dean’s leg. “Minna, be nice,” he said with a chuckle.

Dean was flustered at being spooked, but he regained his humor quickly, stroking the silky black fur. Castiel smiled as he watched them make friends.

“What will you do now?” he asked. Now that he thought about what would come next, he started to feel tense again. There was no way he could ever come near the coal town again; the risks were too great.

Dean shrugged. “Packed up my house. Most of it, I left behind for whoever lives there next, so there wasn’t much to it. Don’t really have a lot planned at this point.”

“But your family!” Cas was stunned. He stared at Dean, trying to understand. “Your brother!”

“Sam ain’t thrilled, I’ll give you that. Thing is, though, I can’t exactly mine anymore. Not much use for a half-crippled guy in a coal camp, you know?” He made a face to show that he wasn’t taking his own words too seriously. “I promised him I’d write and let him know where I was stopping, just as soon as I settle down someplace. ‘Course, he was less fussed about it once I gave him the whole story about Alastair. The whole accident was his fault, did I tell you?” No, Dean hadn’t. It was a good thing Alastair was many miles away, Cas thought, as rage made his blood run cold. “Yeah, that was the same look Sam had, too,” Dean remarked, smirking.

“That man is evil,” Cas growled.

“Well, my leaving might mean Sam and his family are a little safer, anyway. Threatening their safety would be pointless now, right? Anyway, I spent my entire life trying to keep Sam happy and safe, and that’s all he ever really wanted for me, too. So when it looked like me leaving was the only way I could be either happy or safe, Sam wasn’t going to get in my way too much.”

Warmth was starting to blossom deep in Castiel’s chest. “So…you’d stay here? With me?”

“If you want. If this is where you are.” Dean ran a thumb along Cas’s lower lip, then dipped down to capture it in another kiss. “It seems like a pretty nice place, even if it is flatter than a pancake,” he teased. “You’re their teacher, and you can do all the writing you wanted to do, too. I want to see you do that.”

Cas gripped Dean’s shirt collar gently, pulling him in for another kiss, softer and slower than the last. “What will you do? I want to see you happy, too.”

“Well, I couldn’t help but notice that your roof could use some new shingles,” Dean said, trying and failing to keep a serious face. “Did you know I can fix roofs?” It was such an overt nod to their first days together that they couldn’t help bursting into laughter. “I was thinking about fishing, too,” he added after that.

“The bay has lots of fish,” Cas agreed. He would have agreed to anything. “And how do you feel about gardening?”

“Never had opportunity to try,” Dean said thoughtfully. “Think it’s too hard to learn?”

“We’ll find out together,” Cas said. Dean beamed and embraced him firmly, as though he planned to keep him wrapped in his arms for the rest of his life, and Castiel found himself wanting nothing more than that.

Hours later, when the last of the fading sunlight was sparkling on the tips of the tiny waves in the bay, neither man bothered to appreciate the breathtaking view from the window. There were much more compelling sights closer to hand, and anything beyond the reach of their own arms and lips carried no significance whatsoever.

\---

_Dear Sam,_

_I’m writing from the other side of the Blue Ridge mountains. How’s that for me becoming a world traveler? I never thought I’d see the day, and I bet you never did either…_

The letter was one of a handful, all arriving on the same day, though their postmarks showed they’d been sent over the span of months. Well, sometimes mail could be unpredictable, especially in the winter months.

_Dear Sam,_

_I borrowed the paper to write this from another man with a cane. He was older, and he had his leg wrecked for him by the Hun artillery in France. He asked me what battle I fought, and I told him it was in the West Virginia trenches, which confused him until I told him what happened. He thought that was pretty funny and bought me a beer. Guess the cane’s good for something besides keeping me upright…_

“Da-da-da!” Sissy shrieked, impatient for Sam’s attention. He picked her up and bounced her on his knee mindlessly, continuing to scan the scrawled messages.

_Dear Sam,_

_I sure wish I knew if you were getting these letters. No way you could tell me, especially since I’m not staying anyplace long enough to have an address. Good thing it’s warming up a bit, so I don’t have to keep finding boarding houses and spending money on them._

_Good thing about not being able to get letters is that I can tell myself that it’s the only reason I haven’t heard from you and not because you’re still mad. I hate we left things that way. I know you had good reasons to be unhappy about everything, but you know me. Too bullheaded to let anything slow me down. Just couldn’t let_ _him_ _it go without trying anything I could._

_I do miss all of you already. Sammy, you got to promise me that you won’t let the kids forget me, okay? Maybe someday I’ll buy myself one of these fancy cars and I’ll be able to come back and see you all. I know you won’t stay mad forever…_

“Damn it, Dean,” Sam muttered, wiping the corner of his eye. Sarah, bending to lift the baby from his lap, ran a comforting hand across his shoulder but said nothing. Surprisingly, Sarah had shocked both brothers by supporting Dean’s abrupt departure plans over all Sam’s objections. As the men had argued in hushed, veiled phrases— _”You’re barely walking, Dean! And you don’t even know where…”—_ she’d stepped between them and looked Sam determinedly in the face, telling him that Dean needed to go.

“What if it were me?” she’d asked her husband, and Dean had frozen while Sam spluttered in shock. Sarah had shrugged, a tiny smile quirking her lips. “Might take me a while, but I get there. Dean, you look like your heart has gone out walking, and you need to go get it back. That’s nobody’s business to try and stop, not even this one’s.” She’d nudged Sam with her hip and glared sternly. Sam was helpless, slumping in defeat.

He just wanted Dean to be happy and safe.

_Dear Sammy,_

_I changed my mind about wanting a car. These roads are pure torture. I think all my teeth have been knocked loose on the bumps. I’ll just get a mule team instead. Never got this sore riding in the minecars, even if they did have tempers like Old Nick._

_Been meeting tons of folks, more than I ever thought I might. You wouldn’t believe how many little villages I’ve seen. Haven’t found the right one, though, but don’t you worry, I’m not a quitter. Also, it turns out that Quakers know their way around a damn pie. And they’ll put anything in a pie, too—last night I had oyster pie for dinner and sugar cream pie for dessert. Don’t tell Sarah but it might even have been as good as hers, though that could be my hunger talking…_

Sam’s chuckle was lost under the noise of Sarah scolding Jesse for tracking mud into the house. The boy was too tired to put up much argument, having just started apprenticing in the mine stables the day before. It was quite the promotion, going from the breaker to the mules, but the bosses seemed to think that Sam’s goodwill could be bought. Following the fiasco of Alastair’s idiocy coming to light, he knew they were hoping to pin all the blame on one man, rather than on a wider management problem. He also knew they had no idea he was documenting _everything,_ and that UMWA reps had already made contact with him in private. Even Dean didn’t know that part yet.

_Dear Sammy,_

_I found it. I’m home now. And I am the luckiest son of a bitch on earth._

The final envelope had a dimestore card with a black-and-white photograph of an old stone building, labeled “Quaker Meeting House.” In the background, water stretched to the horizon, looking serene and quiet. It was as far from the rugged, mountainous terrain of the mine town as Sam could imagine, but it spoke to him deep inside, soothing his mind as he studied it.

“Is that where they ended up?” Sarah said, looking over his shoulder. “Pretty.”

Sam caught her hand under his own, where it rested on his shoulder, and squeezed gently, letting out a long breath. He knew he’d never stop missing his brother, feeling his absence like a hole in his soul. Even Dean’s handwriting looked more at peace, though, if such a thing were possible—more relaxed, less cramped. The words that he couldn’t risk putting on paper were clear to Sam’s eyes, and the last bits of grudging worry evaporated as he reread them.

“Put these someplace safe,” he said, handing the letters to Sarah, who smiled as she carefully straightened the pile. “And better pick up writing paper at the store tomorrow.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading all this! If you enjoyed it, let me know! As promised, all the fun "behind the scenes" details are in the next not-a-chapter, along with a playlist I made for the fic. The title came from a song I found by a band named Gray, which was used in the movie "Wrong Turn 6" (I haven't seen it, and apparently it's all about hillbilly cannibals in "backwoods redneck WV," so pbbbbbbt), and it's pretty much perfect for Dean.
> 
> Oh, and I'll elaborate more in the next chapter on this point, too, but if you were unaware? That teeny little reference to Sam being in contact with the UMWA would be some scary as shit foreshadowing if I chose to follow that line further. But it would be a huge can of worms to open, so maybe I'll leave it for somebody else.
> 
> Don't forget to read the other fics written for the challenge!


	12. End notes

(All photographs were taken by me unless otherwise attributed. You can click through for larger sizes and more detail!)

In August of 2017, I stood in the doorway to a house that was once inhabited by an Appalachian coal miner, perhaps a hundred years before. Standing there, taking in the entirety of the one-room building that felt barely larger than a child's playhouse, I was struck by how it still felt very much like a home. It definitely wasn't even in the neighborhood of "comfortable." Even "cozy" would have been generous. This photo, which I took myself, unfortunately does not capture the fact that the table in the corner is actually pushed up against the wall on the other side of the room. This is _it,_ the entire living space.

[ _Photo link_ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/fX8JDmbL0BLfu6Cu1)

And the men who lived in these houses (married couples and families had larger buildings, though the available space per person was about the same) would spend most of their daily lives engaged in dangerous, often deadly, labor that paid far too little for what they gave of themselves. The guides at the preserved coal mine talked about all the hardness of the miners' lives, from physical hardships to crippling poverty. They also, however, showed us the coal town school, the church, the uniforms worn by the company-sponsored baseball team. It wasn't difficult to start to envision the complete world of the southern West Virginia coal town, beyond the actual job. This fic was born from that.

As I tried to illustrate, coal towns (or coal camps) were the communities that a mining company would build around the mines they operated. They built the houses, the retail buildings, and everything else required, and they would lease them to the workers. Often, families who needed extra money would, in turn, take in boarders, cramming even more people into the tight living quarters. There was rarely indoor plumbing or electricity, though the supervisor's house might have both. The school building and part of the teacher pay was also provided by the company (a West Virginia law enacted not long before helped ensure that public education was available throughout the state). Castiel would have been hired to teach laborers' children only; the managers' children would have had private tutors or been sent to boarding school. That scene at the start of Chapter 2 demonstrated another state education mandate: every school day was required by law to start with recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and a Scripture verse. (This was pre-World War II, of course, so yes, the children would have been using a "[Bellamy salute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute)," not a hand over the heart, for the Pledge. Once that gesture became associated with certain unfriendly foreign powers, trends quickly changed.)

[_Photo 1_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/LAv5ZlXBXDoPMItV2)     [ _Photo 2_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/cIBeV1wXyG9yj6w43)

Also, in the second picture, note the paddle on the desk.

Besides the school, the companies definitely followed strategies designed to keep workers both pacified and distracted from the hardships of their lives. The Christmas ham gifts were a typical example, as well as the baseball teams. Management would schedule matches against teams from other companies, and they were apparently very popular and competitive.

I hadn't known about the bath houses, but they were also a way to keep morale high.

[_Photo 1_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/RGhCbpcmwIc1kbYB2)     [ _Photo 2_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/Vy5f261oGC7wWYQg2)

All the bath houses and baseball games in the world, though, couldn't really make up for the fact that these miners were mistreated, underpaid, and viewed as less valuable than even the mules pulling the carts. Mules, after all, cost a lot of money to buy. There are records of mine accidents during which mule drivers were told to prioritize saving the mules over saving men. By "men," of course, I also mean young boys.

[_Photo 1_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/OypUOIIyrpq2uJp32)     [ _Photo 2_](https://photos.app.goo.gl/3c5psquYiklx3XCw1)

[ _Photo 3_ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/1Pi1lGqlrD60eAIQ2)

_Photos from "[Growing up in Coal Country](http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/247382416)" (Bartoletti, c1996)_

Regulation was minimal, and bribes were commonplace. Unions...well, they were trying. This story is set about ten years after the [ West Virginia Coal Wars](https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1799), which were a decade of fighting between operators and laborers who were attempting to organize. "War" is not an exaggeration. At the Battle of Blair Mountain alone, there were about 10,000 striking miners standing against 30,000 members of the police, the army, and hired strikebreakers. Netflix has a documentary called "Blood on the Mountain," which tells all about it, and it's fascinating and scary. At the end of the story, when Sam has made contact with UMWA representatives? If Dean knew, he'd probably manage to teleport back, out of sheer terror and adrenaline, to try and stop him. At this point, unions were at a real low point of influence; Sam would be painting a target on his own back if he started trying to organize the workers.

The accident Dean had was tricky. I spoke with some medical professionals (trying not to sound too crazy) about what would have been a likely outcome for a patient like Dean in the late 20s, and I read surgical and medical manuals from the period as well (hurray for library resources!). The miners hospital to which he'd have been taken wasn't a bad one, and crushing injuries were the second most common thing they had to treat (behind burns).

[ _Photo link_ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/FeycuYdbEyr4gryG2)

_Photo from WV State Archives (WVSA), Coal Life Collection_

If there's anything else that you wanted to know, or anything you were left wondering, please drop me a comment or email, here or on my [ Tumblr](http://carrieosity.tumblr.com). I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty well versed at this point. Hope I piqued your interest a little!

[ _Photo link_ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/ikbiE7e0elPUfgbn1)

_I thought the portrait looked a little like Cas, even if he wasn't a miner in this story._

[ _Photo link_ ](https://photos.app.goo.gl/tw3PFOctc5zGs3pn2)

* * *

 

### Dig the Devil's Blood Playlist

(on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/213h427i666dmreueibjhtdta/playlist/6kBZMeGAZbJJN8rMVsN6Sl) or [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRLbu12WQgyLpdTMrGjLl8aK5W0TNCE6j)):

  * “Dig the Devil’s Blood” (Gray) -  
  
_I took a pick axe in my hand when I was just thirteen_  
_They sent me down in number nine to work the devil’s seam_  
_They said, “Dig in deeper, boys, dig the devil’s blood_  
_Dig it deeper down til you see no heaven above.”_


  * “Flaws” (Vancouver Sleep Clinic)  
  
_The burdens on this chest_  
_The vessel of these words_  
_Sinking under tension_  
_Drew afterthoughts and hurt…_


  * “Sonnet 20” (Rufus Wainwright)  
  
_A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted_  
_Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion_  
_…_  
_A man in hue, all hues in his controlling_  
_Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth_


  * “All My Days” (Alexi Murdoch)  
  
_I know I’ll feel this loneliness no more_  
_All of my days_  
_For I look around me and it seems you’ve found me_  
_And it’s coming into sight_  
_As the days keep turning into night_


  * “Familiar” (Agnes Obel)  
  
_And our love is a ghost that the others can’t see_  
_It’s a danger_  
_Every shade of us you fade down to keep them_  
_in the dark on who we are_  
_Gonna be the death of me_


  * “Bloom” (The Paper Kites)  
  
_When the evening pulls the sun down_  
_And the day is almost through,_  
_Oh, the whole world it is sleeping_  
_But my world is you_  
_Can I be close to you?_


  * "Coal Mining Man" (Band of Ruhks)  
  
_Then a dreadful moaning sound_  
_As the mountain started shaking_  
_Timbers breaking coming down_  
_Now the walls are closing in and the air is getting thin…_


  * “Angel in the Snow” (Elliott Smith)  
  
_I’d say you make a perfect angel in the snow_  
_All crushed out on the way you are_


  * “Sonnet 29” (Rufus Wainwright)  
  
_When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes_  
_I all alone beweep my outcast state_  
_…_  
_Haply I think on thee, and then my state_  
_(Like to the lark at break of day arising_  
_From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate_


  * “Ghosts That We Knew” (Mumford and Sons)  
  
_You saw my pain, washed out in the rain_  
_Broken glass, saw the blood run from my veins_  
_…_  
_Give me hope in the darkness that I will see the light_  
_‘Cause oh that gave me such a fright_  
_But I will hold on as long as you like_  
_Just promise me we’ll be all right_


  * “First Day of My Life” (Gnash)  
  
_I remember the time you drove all night_  
_Just to meet me in the morning_ _  
__And I thought it was strange, you said everything changed_  
_You felt as if you just woke up_




End file.
